The most expensive typefaces (2019) | Hacker News Reader

The most expensive typefaces (2019)

medium.com

113 pointszdw43 comments

I used to be on the side of fontographers before webfonts became a thing.

Want to use a particular font for your print/screen production? Just pay for a license fee -- sure you might have to pay per weight, style, or even seat -- but at least you got to use it for your graphical productions as much as you wanted.

Enter webfonts and instead of letting those same bought license "rollover" to the new medium they created a new separate "web licence" (ok, I can pay another fee); but then some smarty pants thought it would be a good idea to charge per usage (0-50K monthly pageviews $price, 50k-100k another price etc), good grief.

Of course not all foundries do this, but this move spawned the rise of many open source fonts with free and open licenses (and initiatives like Google Fonts) so we could have an open web without another copyright license to worry about.

In other news, I just found out that Variable Fonts[1] are the thing, good times.

[1] https://rsms.me/inter/#variable

I'm not sure I understand the logic here. Webfonts are a thing now, which makes all kinds of fonts, both free and expensive, available for websites. How is that anything but a good thing?

Of all the things that message board copyright activists get up-in-arms about, it's hard to imagine one where they have a weaker case than typefaces. Literally nobody needs an expensive typeface; we have more high-quality free typefaces now than anyone has had... basically in all of human history.

The point is simply that if I wanted to create a website and use Circular [0] (a nice geometric font made popular by Spotify) I would need to pay based on total pageviews which is an unknown, so the price is unknown, which is prohibitive in the sense that I'm now tied to a font license that penalizes me based on the success of my website.

Or, I could use Inter which is similar, free, better (more weights, filetype options) and I don't have to worry. This goes beyond price, I really don't want another thing to worry about and a cool font isn't worth the monkey on my back.

> we have more free typefaces than ever...

That's kinda the point I'm making I guess; I believe the recent rise of all these free/open alternatives to popular established ones was precisely because of the webfont-pay-per-pageviews model.

[0] https://lineto.com/typefaces/circular

I get your point, but I don’t think Inter is similar enough to Circular to be a replacement for it. Inter is more of a San Francisco replacement in my book (which is how I use it on one of my websites—SF for Apple devices and Inter as a fallback). They’re both pretty, but Spotify’s UI looks very different than a UI set in Inter.

Tbh I was just reaching for a good "free font alternative" -- ofc they wont be exact clones -- but captures that "clean sans-serif design spirit" that seems to be all the rage at the moment.

Oh, okay. I misunderstood.

We may just be saying the same thing. I think all I'm saying is that there doesn't seem to be anything problematic about the arrangement we've landed on.

If you don't have an idea of how many users to expect, your server costs are an unknown too. I don't see how paying per view will change that.

Unless gp doesn't use any sort of auto scaling what so ever. In which case, the cost will be that of the (known) provisioned amount

The equivalent to that would be to just buy e.g. the 100k users font license, and then stop serving traffic once you hit 100k.

Even alone having to implement this (and perhaps become sued if there is a bug in the code) is a massive liability for the business.

And yet plenty of businesses use licensed fonts just fine, and, at the same time, literally nobody has to. What about this system is problematic?

Except that for most digital services / contents, a server is a core requirement, while any specific font isn't.

I would not going to risk something as secondary to my business as font become a runaway cost, or stop providing my service / content because of something tangentially related to what I offer. And it seems gp feels the same.

A server requires energy and maintenance forever. A font does not.

>.. penalizes me based on the success of my website.

Just how I feel about taxes. “Progressive” taxation penalizes success.

> 0-50K monthly pageviews $price, 50k-100k another price

It's just a way to charge depending on the client's wallet. Standard practice in b2b, so let's be real: nothing new happened with web fonts in this regard.

As a caveat, I'm going on memory here, but I remember licensing to be significantly more expensive than $5000 for international distribution of Adobe fonts for a AAA video game I worked on. They had to secure rights for the font for use in game, in print publications (e.g. print ads), TV, etc. I recall each of these was a full on contract and eye-watering cost well above the prices he quotes.

If the prices he quotes are for unlimited license across all media ... $5k seems cheap to me.

Are those prices per license? Apparently Netflix was paying millions[1] per year to use Gotham before they made their own font.

[1] https://thenextweb.com/tech/2018/03/21/netflixs-sleek-new-ty...

The article implies that they weren't paying millions. Am I reading that right?

From paragraph 2:

> It solves a couple of problems: first, Netflix was paying millions every year just for the privilege of using Gotham. When you license something at such a scale, it gets really pricey.

And just below that:

‘It’s worth noting that Jonathan Hoefler, founder of the Hoefler&Co type foundry that designed and owns the Gotham font, says that the company has “never quoted a client anything close to a million dollars for anything.”’

If you bill 80k a month you still end up with ~1M annually but get to say the above line to prop up your business.

I was really surprised that the article didn't mention Gotham or any other HF&J font. Those were the most expensive I had encountered up until now.

$391 for a single font doesn't sound very expensive to me at all. Even for a small-business project, $400 is likely to be a rounding error for anything where the "designer had to pick a custom face" threshold has been exceeded. Certainly, it must be cheap for any serious print project! Printing costs will dwarf that font cost.

I’m involved in a project right now where the cost of licensing fonts has clearly made some people involved nervous. Of course, the cost is hardly anything compared to the cost of the project as a whole. Probably even less than the cost of the time spent finding the appropriate typefaces and get a decision to license it.

I think it’s just that a lot of people are genuinely surprised that typefaces cost real money, because they are so used to sticking to the ones they have “for free”.

Sure, as a one time cost it's reasonable. But often these fonts require separate licenses for web, and in those cases the costs scale per view often. So getting slashdotted (or whatever the equivalent is now) can be an unknown cost not just because of the hosting but also because of the fonts.

Artbreeder (https://artbreeder.com/) is likely to have a font generation mode eventually. This can generate high quality fonts (as well as lots of Unicode codepoints) and even interpolate between fonts in latent space. You can also take an existing font and find it in latent space, and then regenerate it. Take a look at the header of the Artbreeder homepage to see a small sample of font interpolation. (Apparently the interpolation is not even as smooth as it could be yet.)

I would not want to be a manual font designer in the future.

> I would not want to be a manual font designer in the future.

I wouldn't want to be any designer in the future. Eventually there will be a tool to generate any design with easy sliders and stuff. You can already design logos in software that are as good as the best designers 20 years ago for free with a few YouTube videos, imagine what this type of generation tech will do in the future.

I think that along with the current easy to use API 3rd-party systems, like Stripe or Uberauth, we're basically going to go back to a ColdFusion style design tools for the "low hanging fruit" sites like regional grocery stores and below where there are generic templates for a whole e-commerce site and back end for your business with the front end included, but this time you can use all kinds of knobs, levers, and buttons to adjust it to look unique and personal for your business and the backend generation will happen based on your product data requirements and the like.

We already kinda have that for mom + pop stores and smaller businesses. The only companies that will need handcrafted web apps will be the out-of-the-ordinary businesses like Uber, or the huge companies that need more complex logic, like FedEx or Walmart. Everyone else will either do it themselves with whatever the Wix of this type of thing is or they will hire some farm of developers (like an Amazon warehouse, but with developers instead of pickers) to task one of their drones to do it.

On different kind of note, that page header font warping thing is super fun to look at while intoxicated!

They are not that expensive. I would gladly pay a similar amount for a decent Baskerville LaTeX font with math support. I would have to hide it to my wife somehow, though...

This wasn't about whether they "are" expensive, but about that they are "the most" expensive. If you think this is perfectly affordable, then cool: you can clearly afford every professional font on the market, use that power wisely.

https://tug.org/FontCatalogue/baskervillef/ ?

When did the dog become sleazy?

This is a good start (and baskervald is even better) but is not of excellent quality. I am not talking about the character shapes themselves, that are OK, but about the relationship with greek characters, with LaTeX math, and the quality of accented characters. What the world needs is an available version of the "SMF Baskerville" described by Yannis Haralambous here: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02101627

I wonder if people would chip in to pay someone to do it right.

This is exactly what happened. When the french mathematical society ordered this font they probably paid a lot of money, and then it became a sort of "secret sauce" that they want to use exclusively.

Why is `n` missing from the screenshots?

You'll have to pay extra if you want `n` support

'n' app purchase

Cut off one of the arches of the m, and you'll probably have a good idea what the n looks like.

Conspiracy Theory: Maybe the 'n' is actually extremely ugly, and they're concealing it, in order to sell the font anyway. Is it non-refundable?

That's one off fee. Try using Avenir webfont on your website which get 1 million pageviews per month, the total price you have to pay might even exceed the one off fee of JHA Bodoni Ritalic.

Use Open Sans instead, it's free.

And they forget, that a font face is only a tool. It's just like a golden hammer ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com