Adobe Acquires Web Typography Innovator Typekit
marketwatch.com
marketwatch.com
I have little faith that Adobe won't completely screw it up.
Some are. Some aren't.
And whatever you may think of Adobe- the- company, it seems to me they've been an impeccable steward of digital typography. They clearly care about it more than any other major software vendor.
Nerds will never, ever get it through their heads that typefaces aren't cheap. They're expensive. That's a problem for nerds, because bits are very very cheap, and naturally anything that can be represented in bits and put on a web page should be cheap-as-free. It also doesn't help that most nerds can't appreciate the difference between what's on Google Fonts and what's in Typekit's portfolio, which only reinforces the notion that fonts should be cheap... after all, good fonts appear to be free! Silly designers!
But! But! But! I anticipate the multi-paragraph responses from HN's vast army of copyfighters and respond only with "well that's why we get to choose between Adobe's service and the crappy fonts on Google Fonts, and Trebuchet and Arial". Thanks, copyfighters!
High quality fonts are difficult to make, but I suspect enough people who know enough to take advantage of those good fonts appreciate that and would be willing to pay for them in return. (I have put plenty of my own money where my mouth is on this point.) As a consequence those who use premium fonts well would wind up with better looking sites, and the foundries would wind up with more money.
If those foundries paid attention to other markets, everything from software to music, they could surely find a far more lucrative business model than the mess they've created now where everything is available but most of us can't buy it for most projects. But first they have to get the basic fact that most creative industries have realised by now: in the age of the Internet, when copying is free, the market will not accept your masterpiece at its traditional price, but a lot more people might buy it for a lot less money due to some combination of convenience and sense of fairness.
Funnily enough, services like Typekit almost seem to be aiming for that model, except that they've kind of got the worst of both worlds: prices so cheap for the average small/non-commercial site that they aren't really worth much in aggregate, but legal terms that mean they can't be used for a large proportion of otherwise potentially lucrative commercial sites.
Even then, I think you're overstating the case for the music labels.
> Digital distribution of music has been catastrophic for music labels.
They bitch a lot, but Big Media still seems to make an awful lot of money, despite obvious competition in the Internet age from both less than legal alternative channels for the music and from other ways people can spend their leisure time and money.
Considering the amount of rip-off pricing that was going on prior to the Internet age, the fact that the Big Four still make as much as they do today is remarkable. And that's on top of Apple, Amazon et al making a fortune off it as well, which obviously cuts into the profits of the record labels themselves, and on top of all the other smaller players like Spotify who are redistributing music via different channels.
Digital distribution has been catastrophic for bricks 'n' mortar music stores, but that's about the only group that has lost out disastrously AFAICS. The rest is just a bunch of middlemen who don't create anything themselves finding that their services aren't as valuable as they used to be.
> The foundries are doing OK today. Why would they embrace a new model?
Because otherwise competition from cheap/free fonts and the illegal black market in pro fonts could seriously hurt them. Unlike Big Media, most/all of them are far too small to actively hunt down sites using their work illegally and take the necessary action to get some money out of enough of those sites to survive.
Or if you prefer a more constructive view, because they could make $#!%loads of money selling web fonts, probably at far higher prices than they are making for the equivalent usage via services like Typekit, if they stopped worrying about the people who are going to rip them off anyway and catered for the people who are willing and able to pay them hard cash they won't otherwise get.
I think foundries are as likely to lose money to web fonts as make it, because the people who truly value distinctive typography already pay for it, and the mass market uses Papyrus and Comic Sans.
My comparison was not between foundries and music labels, but between selling fonts and selling music, stock art, etc. The point wasn't who was doing the selling, it was that you can do just fine selling at much cheaper prices to a much wider audience, and that such a model fits the reality of the Internet much better.
> I think foundries are as likely to lose money to web fonts as make it, because the people who truly value distinctive typography already pay for it
But prior to the web font services, there was no way for people to give money to the foundries to use their fonts on web sites, even if they wanted to.
And for those projects where an ongoing rental payment is not a suitable pricing model, there still isn't, which means the foundries aren't even accepting money from people who do value high quality typography and would happily pay for the chance to use it. I just don't see how that makes any business sense at all.
I realize that I am not normative. I consider "The Elements of Typographic Style" one of the better books I have read, period. It is a real pleasure to read: http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Brin...
I am willing to pay $$$ for good fonts, if they are available as web fonts at all. I didn't say that adobe should "democratize" high-end typography, I just said they will get the luddite foundries on-board.
W.R.T. being "virtually impossible to track", I think that is less true than you think it is -- there are many trivial ways to watermark fonts files.
Adobe has always been a very web friendly foundry. They permit things like Cufon use under their standard EULA that covers hundreds if not thousands of fonts. Few years ago, when asking a foundry for a web license would typically produce "La-la-la-la. Can't hear you. Web doesn't exist.", it was unbelievably liberal. It wasn't a fluke either, it was an intentional decision driven from the inside by those from the font group.
In other words, if there is a larger company that I would like to see acquire Typekit, that would be Adobe. They may have screwed few things here and there, but they totally get the webfonts.
I just really don't want the pricing to change, even if it means no adobe fonts.
Though, I wouldn't be shocked to see Adobe jack those prices up. They've never been keen at competing on price.