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Comment by KronisLV | Hacker News Reader

Call me a bit utilitarian or risk averse, but to me it seems that the free fonts out there cover basically all of the use cases that I could have. Surely there are enough fonts like that to fit most of the designs that you could conceivably come up with?

Or do people really look at a font that might cost thousands of USD to use, like Proxima Nova (https://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/proxima-nova) and go: "Yes, this is exactly what fits my creative vision and nothing less will do!"

Not that it wouldn't be worth the price tag for some, but to me that feels like something that only large enterprises for which that's a rounding error might want to do.

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> Or do people really look at a font that might cost thousands of USD to use...

This is part of the business problem that the Adobe CC subscription solves. I you already have a subscription, which is relatively inexpensive and bundled with Adobe software licenses, then the marginal cost of using a particular font in their library is zero.

That said, I've also had a role on the client side and, yes, we spent quite a lot of time discussing which of the font options presented by our designer we preferred and would have happily spent a thousand or two dollars on the one we liked best. Although it seems like a lot for a font, it would have been a very small part of the total budget for the project.

As it happened, though, we were simply presented with a total budget for the project, without a line item for font licensing. Either our designer has some sort of CC-style library license, or it was just rolled into the bundled price. In theory, then, maybe the designers have an incentive to use cheaper fonts in situations like this. But it's probably the designers on their team that most want to use the pricey fonts.

Does the designer's CC subscription cover use by their clients?

I'm not an expert in this area but, according to Adobe, it depends on the use. For rasterized images, PDF documents, etc., the answer seem to be 'yes':

> Does my client need their own font license to use the designs? No, not if you are creating graphics or documents that have rasterized or properly embedded font data, such as a PDF, JPEG, or PNG.

> However, if your client needs to have the font installed to edit your design, they will need their own license, either through a Creative Cloud subscription or as a desktop license purchase.

But for websites, the answer seems considerably more complicated but, essentially, 'no.'

> Can I use web fonts for my client websites? The Terms of Use do not permit reselling beyond December 31, 2019. After that time, the client's website must load Adobe Fonts from their own Creative Cloud subscription to ensure that there isn't any interruption to the font licensing or web font hosting. > Please refer to the full Terms of Use for more information on what reselling the service means, and related definitions. . . . [A few more paragraphs about how to switch things over from your CC account to a client's.]

https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html

Reading between the lines there just a little bit, it seems like Adobe may have run into its own licensing issues. And this all depends on Adobe being correct that they have gotten a license from the creator of the font that allows Adobe, in turn, to convey these rights to the CC subscriber. Uncertainty on exactly these points--Does Adobe allow clients to use the fonts without their own subscription? Does Adobe itself have the rights to allow this?--seems like the root of the issue in the article:

>The one useful Adobe representative we spoke to on the phone last week mentioned that numerous people are having trouble with the Adobe licencing with this particular font. She said that Adobe may not have the appropriate licencing for this font listed on the website – unsure if this is reliable information or not, but thought I’d mention, as if this is the case, there should be more information clearly visible on the font’s webpage about how to use it correctly.

>From our understanding, we have used the font in the correct way (according to the Adobe Web Project method). However, our client does not have an Adobe subscription, so we concerned that we are not covered by the Adobe licence due to this: https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html.

What I've learned is that people go insane when it comes to fonts, and sometimes they have good typographical reasons for it, and sometimes they just have strong opinions. Discussions like this bring both types out, and sometimes they're both right.

I'm a typography fan, but let's admit it - 90% of the world population could live in world where Courier and Comic Sans would be the only fonts avaiable and would not notice a thing.

If you had made the font choices Times New Roman and Arial, I'd have said it's 99.99%.

You need at least one monospace font. I'll die on that hill. Throw one in and I'm on your side.

Done: Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier — because that's a name known to "normies" — it is!

I accept, thanks comrade.

Jokes aside, given all four combinations of serif/sans * proportional/monospace, with a good variety of weights and italics, and you’ll have covered the vast majority of use cases.

Don’t you dare forget Papyrus!

https://youtu.be/jVhlJNJopOQ?si=GYj6XGNv2AMAZqCg

But, the reality is 99.9999% of websites can use one of the free Google fonts. The other .0001% could too, but they want to show that they are not like all the other websites.

The ability of readers to identify a font is largely orthogonal to the psychological/emotional impact it has on them. Designers use distinctive fonts because they transmit a, mostly subconscious, feeling—reliability, innovation, vision, purpose, etc. This is usually tied to a brand and becomes a major part of a company's image, in which case it is crucial to the company's market reach. This is why there are many logotypes that consist of nothing more than the company name in a specific font. Typefaces are _that_ powerful.

So, yes, people would notice if most brands started "feeling" the same.

> they transmit a, mostly subconscious, feeling—reliability, innovation, vision, purpose, etc.

I do not believe this for a second. Has there been any serious research done on this?

Not sure what you mean by "serious", but this is well known in design circles. Maybe this[1] will convince you?

Typography is visual design after all, and is not any different from other design elements we see all around us. It's obvious that it has an impact in how we perceive and experience brands, and the source of any text we read.

[1]: https://www.monotype.com/company/news/monotype-study-shows-t...

Thank you. Also found additional discussion in https://designmodo.com/font-psychology. I'm still skeptical that there is anything intrinsic about the meanings specific fonts convey outside of being used in previous contexts (e.g. conveys "fashionable" because it's overused in fashion industry, per one example). That said, I'm more open to the idea of font psychology now.

That study was funded by Monotype, a company with an incentive to find the result they found. Is it any more credible than other corporate funded research?

That study is interesting to understand the psychological effects of typography. It's not needed to prove that typography _has_ a psychological effect, which we've known for decades.

A sibling comment pointed out font psychology, which you might want to look into. Most of this is rooted in visual design, which is an inexact science, so you probably won't find the type of studies you want to see, for the same reason you won't find studies about other art forms.

Do you not believe in subconscious psychological effects of esthetic choices in general, or just when it comes to typography? If the latter, what about type makes it different from things like color, position, hierarchy, etc.?

I think it's more that the convenience of Adobe's library of proprietary fonts is appealing to (and relatively inexpensive for) most designers.

In my opinion, anything longer than a slogan will probably benefit from the tried-and-tested nature of pedestrian typefaces, and is not the right place for excessive design flair. Nonetheless, it is not trivial to install and manage fonts, nor to understand the licensing obligations of free fonts.

>"Yes, this is exactly what fits my creative vision and nothing less will do!"

It's more like: you are sitting in a room with the c suite, and the design firm they hired to refresh the brand. The design firm sells the c suite on "this font exemplifies who you are and you you want to represent yourself to the world as." Then you chime in and say it looks like every other font and there are legal licensing issues, and the c suite tells you that you are chicken little and the design firm knows what they are doing and will take care of it. They are the experts not you. Why are you even in this meeting?

The last time I worked somewhere that brought in outsiders to refresh the brand, the font they ended up standardizing on was .... Proxima Nova.

Then they will:

tell you they want it installed on all desktop computers and all word templates changed to use it, ignoring mobile only people, and the fact that your brand standards will appear for the purchasing department but not anybody outside the company you send the documents to,

need to be talked out of using it in email signatures, and that the only safe option is Arial. Which they could have just picked for everything in the first place,

ignore the brand standards themselves because conforming to them takes too much time and attention paying.

Pretty soon they will forget they even standardized the company on a font, but the mess will still linger.

Looks 99.9% like Raleway to me: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Raleway

Sure, I can see the subtle differences, but one costs $1650 for all styles, the other one is free. Most of the letters seem to be only stretched vertically by a few percent, with no other visible differences. If I had a job to create a new font, I wouldn't have the guts turning this in as my original work.

They're not at all the same font. If your job was creating fonts, you'd notice the differences.

And since most people's jobs are not creating fonts, most people wouldn't notice the difference. There-in lies the challenge. Typography /is/ important, but it may not be as important as typographists think that it is.

(I tell this story a lot.) I heard an ad on the radio a while back, from the American Podiatry Association, which recommended that everybody should schedule a checkup with their podiatrist once a year to maintain foot health.

I am sure that 95% of podiatrists honestly believe that's good and important advice. Just as 95% of font designers honestly think that subtle differences in kerning are strongly impactful.

> which recommended that everybody should schedule a checkup with their podiatrist once a year to maintain foot health.

Considering the large numbers of diabetics or pre-diabetics in the USA this isn’t actually a stretch.

They are clearly different if you look at them side by side.

Of course, if a document comes with one of them, I certainly wouldn't be able to tell you which one it is. But they are certainly not the same.

If you need a free alternative, the closest I know of is Metropolis[0] by Chris Simpson, although it is closer to Gotham.

[0] https://github.com/dw5/metropolis

depends, if you want a consistent font across a website it's hard with free fonts, because these usually come in bold/regular/italic and that's it, professional font will come with all combinations with wide and narrow lettering on top, plus light and black, so it will cover everything from titles to footers, with a good coverage of unicode glyphs on top of it.

the free ones that come close, like the dejavu font family, are very few and overused.

There is one reply to the same comment as yours with a free font that looks pretty much like this one that has about 3 times as many styles as it. And all of them look fine.

the one I saw lacked condensed versions, but at least metropolis black seems built ok and not an extra bold version like raleway's

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