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Comment by mortenjorck | Hacker News Reader

The quality of open-source typography has massively increased in just the past few years, and it's great to see Intel making its own contribution. The number of free options we have today for well-balanced, full, multi-weight type families (not just "fonts") would have seemed impossible just four years ago.

Intel's entry nicely fills a void left between more humanist types like Ascender's Open Sans and more geometric families like Natanel Gama's redrawn Exo family. It has a nice DIN-esque rigidity to the strokes that the other big DIN descendent, Roboto, doesn't fully embrace.

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This needs to sink into the collective brains of the world's brand designers, many of whom still standardize upon proprietary fonts.

My company creates sites for a variety of brands, and we run into the same problem over and over again. No, we can't hotlink your copy of Frutiger. No, we can't host our own copy. No, we won't accept an email stating "we give you permission to use this font" in lieu of a license from the actual foundry. No, we're not going to embed typography in images or flash. People are often clueless about the technical and legal difficulties of proprietary fonts on the web.

People are often clueless about the technical and legal difficulties of proprietary fonts on the web.

A cynic might suggest that this is because of greedy foundries insisting on a rental model for web fonts, sometimes one so complicated that you need lawyers to figure out what you're actually paying for if you sign up. If they'd tried that with print fonts, most of those foundries would never have made it this far.

What really surprises me is how readily the web design industry caved and paid up, particularly given the relatively poor quality of most early web fonts even from the commercial services, and how many of them remain poor even today.

I'm hoping that sooner rather than later, the prevalence of good quality and fully specified free-to-use font families will force a change in the industry. Personally, I'd be happy to pay a reasonable amount for some good professional fonts. In fact, I have, from my own pocket and not any business's, on several occasions. However, I have no interest in locking myself, my businesses or my clients into ongoing payments for fonts when essentially no other stock resources work that way, and even less interest in hiring a lawyer to figure out whether someone's web font licence covers a particular not-entirely-standard use case.

Is that really so "greedy", as you put it? Isn't it basically SaaS but with fonts?

We don't seem to have a problem renting our software services on a subscription basis (Github, NewRelic, etc.).

I wouldn't call it "greedy", but when webfonts were starting to gain traction (2011-2012), foundries didn't sell licenses for web use, so their fonts were only available on services like Typekit or FontDeck. I don't if that's the case anymore.

Then again, Adobe has moved to SaaS only (or are they selling licenses for non-CC apps?), so designers don't have much of a choice anymore.

Then again, Adobe has moved to SaaS only (or are they selling licenses for non-CC apps?), so designers don't have much of a choice anymore.

Sure we do. You can still buy versions up to CS6 as a one-time purchase. Rather like Microsoft, Adobe's biggest competition has become the old versions of their own software that aren't crippled with ongoing payments and the risk of involuntary future changes to how they work or what they cost.

Presumably they've done the math and reckon they're going to make more money between the people who signed up for Creative Cloud and the people they can now lure in who can afford a relatively low monthly fee but couldn't front the whole cost of CS in a single payment before than they're going to lose from people who won't give them any more money now but might have paid for upgrades under the old scheme. Given how little value they seem to have added either in the later CS series upgrades or since the move to CC, I suspect they're right.

We are willing to pay for SaaS monthly because the nature of the service is that they have to keep providing it for us to get value. Is that true for fonts? If the foundry stopped working, would I not be able to derive value from the font.

Of course, I support the foundries making up any business model they want. But the argument is not the same as SaaS.

> would I not be able to derive the exact same value from the font.

Fixing this for accuracy. I agree.

You're in danger of comparing apples to oranges.

If the SaaS has ongoing value -- for example, if it involves a hosted element that uses resources each month -- then it can be worth ongoing payments. Its value to the customer increases over time.

If the SaaS is just a static piece of software -- or something that might later receive updates of unknown value that you might or might not actually want anyway -- and it's something you will need for the long term, then it probably needs to be much cheaper to rent it than to buy it outright before it's economically worthwhile. Its value doesn't increase over time, so you have to compare the expected cost for as long as you think you'll need to rent it with the one-time cost of buying outright. Even then, you still have the security of your investment to consider if there is no guarantee that the software will still be there or still work the same way when you need it later.

In other words, yes, a lot of SaaS is also greedy.

It isn't inherently something that needs to be SaaS. I could host the webfont on my own server, for example, if it were a legal option. But that isn't allowed, so you're forced to load it off their servers. So yes it's a SaaS but only because the licensing forces it to be that way.

I.e., it treats downloading the webfont into a user's browser as a copy and distribution of software. This is the bit that is ridiculous and needs to change. Print design for example labors under no such restrictions.

When you buy images you don't have to pay per month do you?

Why are fonts different?

Don't go down that rabbit hole. Some genius might find it a good idea to make a subscription-based stock photography site!

Rights-managed (vs royalty-free) stock photography is typically based on duration (and medium).

Does anyone actually sell stock photography on that basis? I can honestly say that I have never encountered such a thing, and I've bought rights to use images, including stock photography, on numerous occasions.

Getty and all the premium stock sites do (for certain collections).

When I worked in the agency world, most of our clients' budgets were a bit too tight for rights-managed photography (RM is generally more expensive on top of being more restrictively licensed), but when we did, there was usually a fairly simple set of web form selects for publication type, duration of publication, audience size, etc.

"What really surprises me is how readily the web design industry caved and paid up"

I don't think there were enough good alternatives at the time. Perhaps secondarily though, the people making these decisions just look at it as another line item on their invoice - it's not coming out of their pocket.

From a small business perspective, if someone tells me my website is going to cost more (maybe in perpetuity?) to use fancy fonts XYZ that creative agency ABC's designer 'just loves', I'd tell them to get stuffed and find something that's free or cheaper.

But agencies that make these decisions are typically dealing with larger clients, and the people making those decisions are working from a budget, not their own pocket.

Well, that's a bit like saying "the world's software developers, many of whom still use proprietary frameworks." Branding agencies use proprietary type families when they're the most appropriate for the job, just like developers use commercial software when it fits a need that the open source community hasn't filled to their liking. Open-source typography is flourishing, but that doesn't mean commercial typography is dead.

> Open-source typography is flourishing, but that doesn't mean commercial typography is dead.

Agreed, I just think the pendulum hasn't swung far enough on the open direction, because of the relative newness of the tech. In other words, it seems that branding agencies sometimes use proprietary type families out of habit and ignorance, not because they've evaluated the tradeoffs and made a careful choice.

In other words, it seems that branding agencies sometimes use proprietary type families out of habit and ignorance, not because they've evaluated the tradeoffs and made a careful choice.

I think their choice is more rational than you give credit for. While there are now quite a few good freely available fonts for use on your blog or small business site, there are still few, if any, open font families that offer the same breadth as good commercial offerings. If you're a large organisation, bringing in an agency to create overall branding guidelines that will apply to everything you produce from slideshows to printed brochures via web apps and business cards, it would be foolish of that agency to suggest typography that didn't offer enough range to be future-proof.

Perhaps. I can certainly appreciate that a brand designer may be worrying about a wide range of print and advertising media, and in that grand scheme of concerns the web isn't all that important.

My (anecdotal) experience has been that given a large enough organization, you're probably going to run into a lot of subsets of the organization that just don't know any better or aren't aware of the company branding strategy and guidelines. It's probably a reasonable bet to say that most of those groups won't be creating public facing content, but I've seen it happen often enough before. Not a broad study, but an interesting note.

Basically, just that it's useful to remember that large organizations, as much as they'd like to be, aren't always as homogeneous and cohesive in branding and approach as they'd like to be.

The following is also anecdotal: I work in the contact center world, and it's pretty surprising just how isolated and disconnected some companies are when it comes not just to brick and mortar vs e-com, but e-com and it's call centers.

Add in more prefaces/cya's that I haven't done formal research on the subject where necessary :)

If you can tell me how Typekit Sync falls into this legal spaghetti, I'd give you a gold star.

Because either it solves a lot of problems, or it creates some new ones and basically makes it super easy to fall into a license trap.

"Open-source typography is flourishing, but that doesn't mean commercial typography is dead"

The two should also not be opposites. There should be room for commercial open-source typography.

If it isn't the typography world is going to be poorer - coz designing good fonts is a hard, skilled, time consuming task and not everybody has the time and inclination to do it for free.

(Otherwise we're going to see more things like the recent non-OSS fork of Merriweather for example http://ebensorkin.wordpress.com/2014/03/02/the-pro-merriweat...)

"Branding agencies use proprietary type families when they're the most appropriate for the job"

Except... they sometimes don't appreciate the breadth of the 'job'. For agency A to get their 'job' done, using fonts ABC works just fine. But now when that same font needs to be use in other areas they're not licensed for, their client either can't have the same brand experience in other media, or has to pay a heftier price to do so, or is running afoul of the licensing terms.

This is a couple steps above people just going to google images and grabbing whatever images come up for their own websites. Still same licensing/terms-of-use problems, just with a higher price tag attached. And somehow, when people are using big fancy agency XYZ, they think (rightly?) that the agency always knows what they're doing (often they do, but sometimes they don't).

Yeah, this hits us Android devs pretty much daily when iOS designers send designs heavily using Helvetica / Helvetica Neue.

Not to mention the (way to common) surprise when you tell them that using that font will cost several thousand $ per year in licensing in the app.

Does Helvetica come as part of iOS?

Helvetica Neue as well…

Haywain, you have been hellbanned and nobody can see your post unless they are logged in and have "showdead" turned on.

What you're suggesting is that designers limit themselves to the what? < 100? professionally designed type families that are freely available? Like it or not, most of the open source fonts in the world are amateurish at best, hideous at worst.

No, we're not going to embed typography in images

What are you saying here - that it's illegal to publish a .PNG with text generated from a commercial font you've purchaes?

Not legal reasons. We don't want to do it for technical reasons.

I truly appreciate the open-source typography as it makes it reaaaaly easy to put fonts into my games. I do not have to design them myself or rely on unscalable image fonts. :\

> The quality of open-source typography has massively increased in just the past few years, and it's great to see Intel making its own contribution. The number of free options we have today for well-balanced, full, multi-weight type families (not just "fonts") would have seemed impossible just four years ago.

What are some examples of the recent ones? (links are preferred, please).

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