Typeface Licensing, For Those Who Think Music Licensing is Easy.
Back, before I discovered the ease of weblogs, I was at design firm exploring the idea of an online magazine (I think we got to issue #2 and archive.org doesn’t even remember it).
This was in the heady days of Netscape 4.0, DHTML, and embedded fonts. As type buff, I was intrigued with the idea of temporarily embedding a typeface in a webpage - seemed like a win win. The publisher benefited by using something more interesting than Arial, the type designer won by having their work exposed to a wider audience, and the reader won by being exposed to more context-specific typefaces.
At the time, I knew some type designers. They weren’t terribly interested experimenting, their licensing agreements didn’t account for the technology (much in the way music licensing today doesn’t account for podcasting). In the end, we settled on using the standard typefaces (Helvetica, Arial, Times, Georgia) and ultimately focusing on other things.
Khoi Vinh over at Subtraction.com (Try Before You Buy Fonts. ) reminded me that despite half a decade passing, we’re still using the same typefaces online and designers haven’t solved the problem of how to promote new typefaces easily. With the days of grunging-up a typeface and selling it for $185 long gone, I fear we’ve lost our opportunity for typographic innovation on the web (I say this admiring subtraction.com.)
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Not only have we lost it*, but many of the major foundries have not crippled it, putting in arcane and ultra-restrictive licensing gotchas…no PDF embedding, no online embedding, etc.
(* I consider embedded type up there with VRML and the like. A great idea, seemed very useful for designers, but, in the end, wasn’t really that important for the edn-users, so never caught on.)
Hey,
I’m still learning the ropes of GD and dabbling into Interactive, but have you heard of ?
I have been paying attention to type issues for a while and this actually seems new. Not Perfect, but not Bad.
As I said, I’m new to interactive, so the implementation is a bit over my head. It seems there would be some well qualified folks among you at this site to try it out.
Sorry about the mangled tag above. Also, I realize it’s not exactly on subject, but I thought sIFR might find an interested audience here.
On the subject of licensing, I’ve been slowly compiling research on how to create a system similar to public performance royalties in the Music industry.
It would allow someone the ability to pay a sliding scale (based on their needs) single license fee annually, and with that license, have access to most vendors fonts.
Darrel posted on sIFR a while back. Mark, thanks for tying these two posts together.
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[…] Yes, this is an extension of a post I wrote 18 months ago: Typeface Licensing, For Those Who Think Music Licensing is Easy. […]