More and more the digital world advances, uniqueness is luxury, and an authentic creative design and brand can become a completely different new identity in online business.Font families can do that and help designers to develop new families and consecutively new online identities for business and personal affairs.
FONT FAMILIES are on the market and selling for hundreds or even thousands of dollars each.
It became a profitable digital business, a font family like 'Gotham' for example, a popular typeface used by President Barack Obama’s campaign and many others, costs nearly $1,000 just to license a complete set of 66 different styles.
Over the past decade, companies ranging from startups like the IT tool company Datto to giants like Intel and IBM have commissioned professional type makers to create fonts that those companies open sourced. Even Adobe, which sells licenses for some of its font families for hundreds of dollars, has released a super family of open source fonts.
It's easy to see why web designers would want free, high-quality fonts, they directly work with it on a daily basis. But why would an independent type designer open source their own work and still believe to be in business? Just as in open source softwares, the reasons can vary, but the advertising made by sharing design materials has its own business and can be profitable indeed.
For companies, the reasons to open source a font that they've commissioned, often mirror the motivations while releasing a new software, in the hope that others will help to improve it. "It feels like a real collaboration," says JetBrains team lead Konstantin Bulenkov.
Even if designers don't contribute improvements to a font directly, companies can benefit from making their work an open source. After all, advertising is a free business and speaks for itself when a product is offered for free to be used by its customers database. For example, Adobe Type senior manager Dan Rhatigan says, releasing its Source super-family of fonts as open source has enabled the company to test new typography technologies like, "variable fonts", which make it easy for a designer to adjust the weight of a typeface and then before rolling those same technologies into other products they have as software makers. In other cases, open source fonts help support other aspects of a company's business. For example, Google Fonts program manager Dave Crossland says many of the fonts Google has funded most recently are designed for under-supported languages in developing countries. These efforts buttress Google's "Next Billion Users" initiative, which aims to bring more people in developing countries online. Better support for more languages means more users, and ultimately, more money for Google.
The incentives to create open source fonts weren't always obvious. In early 2009, a graphic designer and programmer named Micah Rich came across a forum post by a student who was interested in knowing more about how fonts worked. The student asked whether there was a professional-quality open source font to learn from. The replies weren't kind. "There were like 20 pages of professional type designers saying, 'This is our livelihood, how dare you ask us to work for free?'" Rich says. Rich understood where the designers were coming from. Type design is a laborious craft. In addition to drawing hundreds or thousands of individual characters, you need to define the relationship between characters or groups of characters. It takes months of full-time work to create a new font. But the complete dismissal of the open source model bugged him.
"I would never have learned anything about code if not for open source," he says. "Design and programming are not that different."
There were a few professional-quality, fully open source fonts that had been around for years, including Adobe Utopia, Bitstream Charter, and Victor Gaultney's Gentium. But there were far more poor-quality free-to-download fonts, many of which weren't released under true open source licenses that would allow you to study the inner workings of a font or distribute your own changes to the original. As the forum poster learned, it wasn't easy for a newcomer to figure out where to start. So Rich and his design-business partner Caroline Hadilaksono came up with the idea of an “open source type foundry” that would curate high-quality open source fonts and encourage type designers to share their work. They launched 'The League of Moveable Type' website in early 2009 with its first offering, Junction, a sans-serif typeface that Hadilaksono designed in college.
"We’re not asking type designers and type foundries to sacrifice profit," the League's manifesto says. "We’re asking them to consider the benefits, to create a community where we not only have a high design standard for print and web alike, but also a community where we’re able to share our creations, knowledge, and expertise with our peers and the world." It's the basis of everything in the life of a designer, it's on the name itself, 'Font Families', so let it be.
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