paulmckeever

The article suggests that tech companies believe brand is important, and therefore invest in building custom typefaces to save on licensing fees.

That doesn't really hold up. The cost of developing a custom typeface can easily run from hundreds of thousands into millions of dollars.

It can take a huge amount of time and energy from within the company to commission and direct a large creative project.

Typeface licensing costs are a very small proportion of what most companies will spend on brand marketing.

And saving money on a small line-item isn't exactly a recipe for getting promoted.

Announcing that your shiny new typeface will save the company lots of money is, more likely, a post-purchase rationalisation that helps make everyone feel good about the investment.

If the driver was primarily to reduce licensing costs, there are some great alternatives:

1. Use one of the many terrific free and open source typefaces that will cover all the languages and use cases you really need (like Noto or Open Sans). Or even better, system fonts.

Jeremiah Shoaf has a terrific curated list here: https://www.typewolf.com/google-fonts

2. Threaten to use a free alternative and then negotiate a better deal on licensing

3. Go ahead and use your favourite typeface without declaring the full usage so it is unlicensed or under-licensed. This saves a lot of money and is actually pretty common.

In the past I've interviewed designers and creative teams about how they choose and decide to license typefaces. They talk about things like:

* wanting to create exactly the right aesthetic for their brand (i.e. I can only be satisfied by something that doesn't yet exist)

* finding usage-based licensing complex as it creates non-financial costs in terms of understanding, tracking and justifying the licensing costs. That all gets much easier if you own the typeface.

* reducing the risk of inadvertent copyright infringement and subsequent reputational damage

* feeling in control by owning the IP (and therefore not dependent on any third party in future)

I just saw that their pricing page has changed. We're an early user and I didn't notice that they've dropped the free for small business plan.

We use CharlieHR which is free for up to 10 employees

60% of the amount between £100-120k.

For that additional £20k in gross salary, your take home pay only increases by £8k, so the _marginal rate_ for each additional pound in that bracket is 60%.

Would love to see calendar sync for MS exchange supported :)

This article is a badly assembled collection of other people's ideas. Taking most out of the content out of its original context is why it doesn't make much sense.

Not according to the American Marketing Association. Their definition - which is used as the textbook definition of marketing - goes like this:

"Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large."

Marketing is _not_ simply about communicating the value of products. Advertising something that doesn't help a customer create or experience value is not marketing.

I think you'd find this article and the comments interesting:

http://avc.com/2011/02/marketing/

When you change the style of an element, like a paragraph, it works like CSS and applies the change to all elements of that type. To add specificity, you have to give an element a class.

Really appreciate the feedback.

Thanks for the heads up. I work with @phawk so will see if we can get a fix out for this.

I completely agree. Being able to hand-code doesn't mean it's always the easiest way to develop an idea.

And well done guys. Getting this far in 7 months is very impressive.

Having been part of the team that designed and built Typecast (http://typecast.com), it took us over a year to really get somewhere. Building browser-based design tools is way harder than it looks.

That's not really what responsive design means at all. And I don't find your comment particularly constructive.

Useful content is essential. But responsive design is about making that content readable, accessible and hopefully attractive to the reader no matter what the device they're using to consume it.

It has nothing to do with "pretty" layouts and everything to do with the web's fundamental principle of universality.

And - by the way - many people do care how something looks, especially on mobile. Just because a site has good content doesn't mean it shouldn't be easy to read.

You could always try http://typecast.com for this, which allows you to preview and compare fonts from multiple web font providers (disclosure: I'm on the team there).

A good general rule of thumb is to use a heavier weight for the light text, which makes it more legible. You might also think about picking a typeface which has good contrast in the letterforms in this kind of situation.