More than 1,500 new fonts – including all-time favorites – come to Adobe Fonts
blog.adobe.com
blog.adobe.com
Because it used to* be available out of the box, everywhere. Not because it’s such a great typeface. I can’t imagine the sequence of short-sighted enterprise design decisions that puts someone in a position where they have to use Arial through Adobe Fonts.
* I guess that’s no longer true because of Android?
This is like calling beige office walls a “universal favorite.” And I bet people at Adobe today are still confused by their poor reception on Bluesky. They lost the ability to talk to their customers years ago. They only have prisoners now.
On the other hand, Arial is pre-installed not just on Windows, but Macs and iOS. And Adobe doesn't make e.g. Illustrator for Android or Linux.
So what Creative Cloud app runs on an OS that doesn't already have Arial? What am I missing? Do they have something that runs on Android?
Still, Arial isn't poor. It's nearly Helvetica. It's a knockoff, but all it does is simplify some letterforms. It's not like it destroys the spacing or balance or weight or anything. You're talking as if it were Comic Sans...
The only people it might look cheap to are graphic designers. So who cares?
I mean, like you admitted, it's not even a question of aesthetic qualities like the balance of letterforms. You really care about the extra-aesthetic connotations of whether the leg of an uppercase R is straight or squiggly? There are more important things in life. And I say this as someone who cares quite a lot about typography.
Like, sure, Palatino and Optima have strong associations with certain decades that even people who don't follow typography feel subconciously. But Helvetica vs. Arial? C'mon, I don't think so.
Adobe and Unity both come to mind.
I don't think I've seen a brand increase margins at the cost of customer satisfaction, successfully.
The development community took it so well it lead to CEO stepping down and reversing of the decision.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/06/...
Also considering you need to pay for Adobe software to work in certain industries, it is absolute evil.
I understand that there was a lawsuit and all that, I read through part of the Adobe thread from the other day. I am not defending Adobe in that regard.
If you only want the software for 2-3 months, the month-to-month agreement is available, but if you have a longer-term need for the software you get a discount for committing to a year's worth. If you take the discount, pay the cheaper monthly cost and then cancel before the end of the commitment, a penalty seems fair.
Again I am not defending whatever obfuscation of terms that led to the oft-mentioned lawsuit, just that there seems to be some confusion about monthly and annual commitments.
Also because they offer “a discount” on the first year here, it’s 38€ month/yearly plan or 104€ a month/monthly.
I don’t know. If you’re going to allow Adobe to buy its competitors and monopolise entire regions of our economy, this seems a bit shit.
I get why some folks are angry, it was easier to pirate Adobe back in the day. If people don’t want to pay, there’s all sorts of competition in different segments of the market as well as open source.
> Find a perpetual software license or 12 month subscription that allows for cancellation for convenience.
All of them with Canadian customers, for example. It's a product with incremental costs and incremental value, so cancelling it (neither paying incremental costs nor forcing the service provider to do the same) makes perfect sense.
> It was easier to pirate back in the day
That's not the problem at all. Gimp is way better than the piratable photoshop ever was. It's not useful to ad hominem people who don't want to be abused.
Many companies still have 12 or 24 months plans, and you're on the hook for some form of penalty if you cancel before the term. And no, I'm not talking about buying a plan-subsidized phone, even "naked" plans have this.
Since some years ago, companies have started offering monthly-only plans, so you can cancel anytime. But, for some reason, there still are cancelation fees, which are fixed. What's funny, is that they also usually offer rebates if you switch providers, which usually cover those fees.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but, at least where I live, the Adobe scheme is fairly common.
It's the same shit internet providers used to do in the US that thankfully they can no longer do. I cannot understand anyone defending Adobe on this if they actually used that plan the way they explained it. Maybe it's better now, but it absolutely was shady as hell a few years ago.
Sucks to say because I do like their software.
I got tricked into the "pay monthly for annual subscription" (it was probably written there, just hidden very good). I then cancelled my subscription and instead of telling me "it runs anyway another 10 months", they let me cancel early, charging me a cancellation fee (which I only realized after it was too late) which was _higher_ than the remaining months.
Now I will never ever buy something from Adobe again.
Very possible that the current pricing/wording is the result of being sued by the DOJ.
For those wondering about pricing.
Say I create a logo with one of these fonts, and immediately cancel afterword. Do I get to continue using the logo? Or is my license to the font technically revoked?
Also, font licensing elsewhere sucks for making native applications. They have this bizarre price structure where for web it's cheap, but if you want to embed it in an App it's 10x the price. It bums me out because occasionally I'd like to use/buy fonts for projects but they're out of reach. I took the first google result to test this real quick, "Web" or "Desktop" usage is $78, but "App" is $1,326 (https://www.myfonts.com/products/astros-package-83387/licens...).
And I guess they've moved to doing subscriptions for all licenses there too.. so I guess I'll never be buying a font again. Maybe that was the answer all along https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J06tluN7rtE
From the perspective of US copyright law, a font file is an odd sort of computer program that generates shapes. The program is copyrighted, but the shapes it outputs are not.
Indeed, US copyright law explicitly states that typefaces - i.e. the shapes printed on paper, not the font program which produces them - are ineligible for copyright. This applies even to fantasy scripts; e.g. the script used in the video game Riven was refused registration on these grounds.
So say as you said, you had access to a font, you used it in a logo. Then you lost access. It's fine to keep using the logo, any assets you've created while you had access you can keep using. What you can't do is keep using that font file on your machine to start making making new assets. This is why for graphic design fonts are often licensed based on the number of machines they're installed on.
For web, it's often a subscription for a certain number of page views. If you no longer pay the subscription, then you're no longer allowed to serve the font file. Enforcing this however, is really tricky for foundries as you'd expect.
For app use, the license don't account for 'page views' as they figure it's impossible to track (and for the foundry to check). That's often why the figure is more for native apps. They're also kinda taking a guess that companies making apps pay more.
This is why a lot of big businesses will just outright 'buy' a font, so they have access forever with no limitations. If you're committing to a particular font for your brand, it often makes sense to just drop the cash and get it. It's also why so many really big companies just make or commission their own typefaces - it can be cheaper than trying to find some deal with a foundry. A good typeface will take one person about 2-3 years to make, but if you have 1k employees.... no biggie.
It's worth noting most serious foundries don't focus on 'small' customers - they're targeting very large businesses. The pricing doesn't scale down to most normal people, unfortunately - however if they did they'd be dramatically reducing income from the 'whales'. There's also undeniably a bit of price-value bias.
This all varies a bit foundry to foundry, but that's the most common setups and why.
They’re just regular OpenType files, albeit with “beware of the leopard” levels of filesystem obfuscation, so it’s fairly trivial to divorce them from Creative Cloud’s control if you want/need to.
And on the web, Typekit is just CSS and woff(2), so again, no (technical) impediment to doing whatever you want with them.
Reminds me of using one of those awful Microsoft maze websites like Azure.
I am greatly amused whenever someone rants about how Helvetica is beautiful and Arial is terrible. They're the same thing.