Hi! I’m Thierry Blancpain, co-founder of Grilli Type. If you have any questions, happy to answer! I designed and coded the site, although it’s quite a mess ;)
367 karma · joined February 2, 2011
http://www.twitter.com/blancpain & http://www.twitter.com/GrilliType
I’m a designer, my work consists of giving people critique and telling them what’s wrong with their work, and how to make it better. I couldn’t survive half a day without this.
What this month is about, for me, is getting rid of useless negativity in my life. And that comes from complaining, to a large degree. If you want to tell your congrassman he’s wrong, go for it. If you want to call a company and ask them to repair your product, do it. But stop complaining to your colleagues about the rainy Saturday, and instead tell them about the sunny Sunday that you shared with your friends.
On page 6 of the specimen PDF (http://grillitype.com/sites/default/files/specimen/GT-Sectra...) you can read about some of the design elements and why we chose them. The ink trap in the lowercase y is one of the stylistic ink traps, designed to create a higher contrast and add visual sharpness to the typeface.
Our typefaces for the web are auto-hinted, the only realistic possibility for smaller foundries. We hint them with all possible auto-hinting tools and then decide which one looks best (per style) across all rendering environments. The results will never be perfect, but absolutely acceptable across a large number of rendering environments and type sizes used.
No auto-hinted font is going to look perfect at 8px sizes, for that you absolutely need hand-hinted fonts (and even then they look like crap). But hand-hinting a font costs thousands of dollars per style – or about $50 per character, more or less. Only big foundries and operating system providers like Microsoft can do that. GT Sectra for example contains around 900 glyphs per style, across 30 styles.
Additionally, the whole industry is moving away from manual hinting, as more and more high-dpi devices are on the market, and operating systems’ rendering of typefaces becomes less and less dependent on hinting information (OS X ignores it completely, for example). It’s just not an investment that’s really worth it going forward.
You can see GT Sectra in small use for example in use on http://reportagen.com – and it holds up pretty decently in my opinion. Or don’t you think?
For the organization, the benefits of longer engagement are pretty obvious as well.
He's right about a lot of bad developers (and clueless execs) producing really crappy apps. He's wrong if he thinks that a lot of the bigger brands are still at that stage.
Don’t Make Your Customers Steal --- Nearly three years ago, I founded a small type foundry, Grilli Type [http://grillitype.com]. A type foundry designs and releases typefaces, which you may know as fonts.
Given that I’m both an avid internet and media user, I always think a lot about content piracy and what to do about it. As a content consumer that means I was easily swayed by Spotify’s offer for unlimited music for a tiny sum each month.
As a content producer, I was very unsure what I should do. Designers need to be able to show typefaces in use in their designs for their clients to sign off on those purchases. Because of this and font files’ tiny file sizes, digital font piracy is and has always been rampant. Most designers have thousands of illegally downloaded fonts on their computers.
A little over a year ago, we decided to do something about this. We started offering one of our typefaces as a free trial version, allowing our prospective customer to download and use it – with a limited character set – in their native design applications. The sales of that typeface roughly tripled after we started offering it as a trial version. Definitely a commercial success.
So from today on, we are offering free trial versions [http://grillitype.com/free-trial-fonts] of all of our typefaces. A demo version of our fonts, so to say. We’re only the second foundry [http://swisstypefaces.com] to do so, and it’s hard for me to understand why.
What I learned from this is that it pays off not to treat your audience as pirates even if most of them usually are. It validates my belief that if you give your audience a great path to pay for your products, your audience will pay. Give them a chance to do the right thing and those who would have ever paid for your product will do it even more gladly now.
Even the sometimes slow to adapt type industry can change. So let’s have some hope for the movie and music industry, too.
Constructing this as some sort of malicious action of foundries is quite far from the truth, though.
In the fairy land of foundries, there's the great and unrivaled king – Monotype – and then there's a thousand princelings with a few princes (Adobe, FontFont) sparkled in between.
Type is a TINY market. In a back of the envelope calculation last year, I found that the whole type industry is generating around $120m – $150m in sales every year. Monotype/Linotype is around $50m of that pie already. Adobe Type is another $20m is I recall correctly. FontFont is a private company but I take their overall revenue is something like $10m.
Most other foundries are 2 men operations that produce a small profit but not enough to make huge technological investments like hand-hinting the complete back catalog.
At that point a foundry has three options:
1) Not offer their catalog for web- and app licensing at all. The respected resellers / foundry VLLG (Village, http://vllg.com) does this currently, for example.
2) Offer them on request, with the possibility of having a conversation with the customer about their expectations and what they're really getting for their money. See the note in the sidebar on http://commercialtype.com/typefaces/atlas as an example for this.
3) Offer them no matter what rendering quality on Windows devices they can achieve.
While horrible Windows rendering this does not apply to mobile app licensing due to better rendering engines and high-resolution displays on most current devices, it's still a large effort for most small foundries. Setting up the products in the e-commerce backend is the smallest part of that. And all that effort is a bet on (currently) a very small possible return.
And last but not least, one thing to understand is that most foundries make a huge percentage (60%+) of their money licensing large volumes to bigger companies. One corporate design may include office fonts for 500 workstations. While I personally love selling to small studios and startups that love our work, it's not what pays the bills.
If you do this study-ability option, you can go on to an applied university that offers a BA for a lot of degrees, although not all that 'proper' universities offer. Afterwards you can go on to an MA still.
In the entrepreneurship world, three years may be too much. But I can see a solution in figuring out a system where each company keeps each apprentice for one year, so each apprenticeship includes work at three different companies. This would allow the apprentice to get to know the world of start-ups and big companies alike, allowing him to make a differentiated decision when it comes to search for an employer afterwards.
While many companies in Switzerland will prefer a university graduate over an apprentice, I do think especially Silicon Valley would be open to look at (at that point) experienced programmers with a wide variety of start-up and enterprise experience under their belt, as well as a decent basic level of general knowledge due to the two days of school each week.
What I'm coming at is that I doubt you would have to reinvent the wheel. Look at well-organized examples of apprenticeship-systems around the world, adopt and adapt the best-fitting one, and make it work for your ecosystem. It's a great way to make more practically oriented people more valuable for society.