> Am I crazy for expecting fonts to be free? There are so many good options that I can use without paying a license fee. I can't imagine liking the tiny differences in a font so much that I would get myself locked into a yearly licensing fee.

Having worked at Microsoft for years, I also got a chance to work directly with Monotype on custom fonts for a project's specific needs (wearable, tiny screen, specific DPI).

Monotype is amazing to work with. And given the amount of work they did, and what we got out of it, the price was absurdly reasonable.

For your blog? Use a free font.

But if you need a custom font, you really do need a custom font, and Monotype is #1 in the industry for a good reason.

I never understood under what circumstances you would really need a custom font. Could you say more about why that was the case?

Both Netflix[0] and the company I worked at designed custom fonts to _save_ money. As other comment threads say, it's a standard practice to license by pageviews, and it can be difficult to negotiate. Alternative: just have your own custom font, exclusive and unlimited license.

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/21/17147170/netflix-sans-cus...

...but was it cheaper than just finding a suitable free font(s)?

However, if a design team wants to make their own font and has the resources to do so I don't see why not. It's a strong branding move.

The problem is that for these companies, they're in danger of being burdened by copyright issues, as somehow everyone forgets that designs are copyrightable in Europe, and unlike programmers most designers don't really want legal uncertainties when it comes to their designs (because it's damaging in their circles). If they're designing from scratch, they hold those design copyrights and designers can rest easy knowing that they won't get sued.

It was cheaper than licensing a couple of fonts we liked. So we asked the designer of one of these fonts to tweak their font to our brand, and license as new IP under new name. Because it wasn't entirely "from scratch" the price was reasonable, around $50k.

Video Games is an example, each AAAA games I worked on had custom fonts (that was used in-game but also for our powerpoints presentation during the making of the game).

Woah, quadruple A games? Did you work at The Initiative?

Likely branding. For example, Coca-cola can write pretty much whatever they want on the can and you'd still know it was them because of the font.

I'm just guessing, but based on the description (Microsoft, wearable, tiny screen, specific DPI) it sounds like for the Microsoft band: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Band

Microsoft Band, curved screen, tiny DPI, and we initially were using raster fonts, not true type. 4 bit alpha for anti-aliasing.

Primary glyphs were hand hinted, with glyph of each font size custom made to fit on our grid.

For v2 we ended up using Monotype's awesome embedded font engine that let us have real true type font rendering in just kilobytes of RAM with a 96mhz CPU. Insanely cool tech, I believe we were the first adopters of it, we helped them optimize a fair bit of the underlying engine code, and fixed some bugs along the way.

Still a custom font file though. Both the true type and raster fonts were variants of Segoe, Microsoft's main UI font. We wanted it to be on brand, but also look great on our screen.

So tl;dr that is why the MS Band 2 had really good looking CJK glyphs and it is how we pulled off anti-aliased fonts on a tiny LOL CPU with next to no RAM. :)

A distinctive font can be very recognizable, just like a logo, colour pallet and other parts of a house style.

I've recognized fast food places abroad with the logo text translated into Arabic or Cyrillic by the font.

Why your font choice matters:

https://pimpmytype.com/open-sans/

Fonts are software. They require design and engineering. Are there free, open-source, high quality fonts? Yes, there are. And some businesses choose to sell their fonts. It's their responsibility to make sure discerning users see the justification in that.

Just like software, there are often free alternatives that can suit your fancy... but sometimes, you have to pay for what you really want or need.

I wouldn't pay an expensive yearly fee for a font, but as software developers like to get paid, graphic designers do as well. Of course you have a lot of graphic designers who do that as a hobby or don't want money and share it freely, but graphic design is a bit different than open source code because the creator doesn't get as much benefits from sharing the work.

Fonts are a herculean effort and a dazzling display of creativity and taste. The fee for a good font is, generally speaking, nominal. Use free fonts if you want, but a good font is worth paying for.

You are "crazy"[0] for expecting them to be free. But if you don't want to use a paid font, that's totally within your prerogative.

[0] though I prefer not to use that word, perhaps a better word would be 'entitled'

I'm happy paying people for their effort and creativity. This licensing agreement is not something I would personally consider though:

> You get a total number of prepaid pageviews that can be used over time. This means that you will pre-pay for a number of pageviews, then you’ll have to come back to order more after your site has been viewed that number of times.

> For example, if you order 250,000 page views, when your webpages using the webfonts have been viewed 250,000 times, you will need to buy the webfont package again for an additional number of prepaid pageviews. Pageviews are valid for 4 years.

(Then again I mostly do tools and infra so I'm not in this market anyways.)

Oh, I'm not defending this license in particular. That's a great point, apologies.

Most fonts I see for sale have a one-time license fee for # of views/month. So if you do 500k monthly views you pay ~$99 once, and 5MM views is X*4. That's pretty reasonable to me, the costs are hardly prohibitive.

If you're looking for a fantastic variable font, I can recommend Proxima Vara[0], which is the variable iteration of Proxima Nova. It follows this licensing structure.

[0] https://proxima-vara.marksimonson.com

> [0] though I prefer not to use that word, perhaps a better word would be 'entitled'

Then why not use that word?

I was quoting the OP.

Ah, apologies.

I don't know about expecting them to be FREE. But sometimes I have to laugh at the licensing terms I see on some fonts.

I have a weird fascination with fonts. They're pleasing to look at, and interesting to compare. But come on. At the end of the day, pretty much 95+% of contemporary fonts are trivial little tweaks to Garamond, Baskerville, Helvetica, Century, or some other font that hasn't been novel for centuries.

What people are paying for are the most subtle of cues, to make their text subconsciously distinguishable from the next magazine or marketing campaign. For a few years, until the new font becomes old-hat or commonplace, and needs to be revamped again to keep your brand subconsciously fresh.

Obviously there is commercial value in this, or else people wouldn't pay the amounts that they pay for fonts. But I don't understand why we lionize font designers the way the we do.

Type design is never finished business. We do new faces, and sometimes just for the sake of novelty.

It is even not needs to be new. Helvetica was designed by Max Miedinger and released by Haas Foundry in 1957. Then it was revised in 1983 as Neue Helvetica. Later, in 2010, it was digitally revived for Bloomberg, with faith on Miedinger’s original designs, and now considered to be best digital design amongst designers (you can even see it’s been mentioned in this thread too). Is it a bad thing that it was revived, even though there were a lot of digital designs(Nimbus Sans and such)? I don’t feel so.

Why do we need new typefaces:

https://klim.co.nz/blog/why-we-need-new-typefaces/

People start to care when they get deeper into the graphic design rabbit hole and basically express their work through type and its character exclusively, like in logo design, poster design etc. where type character has a big impact on the individual letter level.

Body and sub-heading text is a bit more forgiving and less detail thirsty, the focus is more on the texture of textblocks rather than the individual letter or words.

If you have to cut up and modify individual letters, Helvetica can be quite nice to work with.

First of all, there are many free fonts but most of them contains a very narrow subset of characters. If you want a complete font with 3000+ Latin+Greek characters and variations like old-style numbers, small-caps, ligatures and so on, that's a massive work behind it. And also, as an individual, of-course it's expensive to pay hundreds of dollars on a complete font-family, but for a company making money on graphic design that's really not a problem.

Most foundries offer perpetual licenses though, only foundries that offer yearly fee _that I’m aware of_ is Font Bureau and Dalton Maag, compared to maybe hundreds of foundries which offer non-expiring licenses. I agree there is some quirks with license system though.

You’re missing a very important point: Designing fonts always cost money. The thing with Google Fonts (and/or with other free fonts) is the price was paid beforehand by Google (or of course, with hobbyists free time).

Well, no, it's realistic. I find myself going to Google Fonts more and more these days, even for serious brand work. This is mostly due to Google and a few other companies sponsoring the making of great open fonts.

However, the free market situation is pretty yikes. A few giants and a bunch of boutique foundries (check out https://klim.co.nz/) still make it work, but the open source monetisation problem that we find in software is a lot worse when it comes to fonts, because there is no sustainable product/service to sell with your free font.

Maybe the age of great font making is coming to a close. After what must be hundreds of thousands of great fonts (and so many people still just opting for Helvetica), maybe we got all we need.

I think there's still some spaces where new fonts thrive: company branding, movies, and television.

Yes, you are crazy and perhaps even entitled to think that you deserve the fruit of all font creator’s labour for nothing.

Google Fonts disagrees.

Show me where I can get Pragmata Pro on Google Fonts.

I expect some fonts to be free, but I do not expect all fonts to be free. The former is because we have become dependent upon fonts through the use of technology, and having restrictive licenses upon all fonts would inhibit the use of technology. The latter is because I have no desire to dictate the terms that font creators use.

That being said, I don't have high expectations or great needs of fonts since legibility is the most important criteria. Fonts are tools to differentiate the structure of a document. In most cases, the design of a document is less relevant.

Paying for products per se is not a problem. What always becomes a problem are stuff like unfair pricing, surge pricing, extortionate rates and fees backed up by monopoly/DRM/regulations, recurring subscriptions or ever increasing rates for the same product with no meaningful improvement and so on.

Fonts can be sold but pricing calculated per page view and device just strikes me as a bit too much. Why not just sell them at a flat rate? Unlike software fonts seldom change once bought so what is the basis for subscription fees instead of one-time sale?

The price of a Ferrari also seems unreasonable to me. I drive a different car. I also use fonts other than Helvetica. I'm not entitled to either of them.

Why are so many formerly desktop applications sold individually per major version now sold as subscription services delivered online through the browser?

The answer is the same.

I'm not sure the answer is the same.

A subscription provides ongoing revenue to the developer/publisher, but in the case of software, that revenue is (theoretically) being used to fund ongoing development of the product. Whether this is better for users than the traditional paid upgrade model is debatable, but there's undeniably value to the developer in a predictable revenue stream, and as long as the subscription price isn't totally out of whack compared to the old upgrade model I don't mind it. Assuming the developer is keeping up their end of the bargain, so to speak, and making regular releases of the software, then it's perfectly reasonable for you to keep paying for those releases.

But fonts are mostly a different matter. It's vanishingly rare for there to be more than tiny tweaks to a digital release of a typeface after its initial release. Unless I'm paying for someone else to host web fonts for me -- which Helvetica Now's web font license doesn't seem to entail -- this seems to be considerably more usurious. Print magazines weren't charged an annual cost for their typefaces based on their circulation; web fonts should really be no different.

greed and overreach? lack of alternatives? lock in?

Just the first, money.

If you don’t like terms don’t pay it. They wouldn’t do it it if it didn’t make money. If the terms are not appealing use a free font.

Yes, the good ones require a lot of hard work by designers and producers.

Where else can you find a sans-serif battle-tested over a century that's variable, for free?

Should we reasonably expect the fruit of anyone's labor to be free? It's a designer's right to voluntarily give away their product, but that doesn't mean it's our right to use just anyone's work for free without their permission.

Just use the free ones. There are some that are better than Helvetica, just like there are cars cheaper and faster than a Ferrari without the brand name.

I wonder which is the most fully featured free Helvetica clone?

TeX Gyre Heros[0] is the most faithful (to the original Helvetica masters) FOSS reproduction that I'm aware of.

[0] https://ctan.org/pkg/tex-gyre-heros?lang=en

Oh man TeX Gyre. That brings me back. Good to know it’s solid!

Check “TeX Gyre Heros”. It is featured version of Nimbus Sans (aka Helvetica digitised by Bitstream) which were donated to X Consortium back then.