131–140 of 197 posts
And yet, I just can't imagine ever using this in actual design. Licensing makes it ridiculous to recommend to almost all clients, and there are great, much more affordable alternatives, Inter being completely free.
Fantastic font, now infinitely malleable! Unfortunately it is expensive, and you can't just buy it and use it, you have to renew the license annually. https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mti/helvetica-now-variable?tab... And my use case isn't even covered: include in a web application that will be downloaded and installed by customers. My current choice is OpenSans https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans
> you can't just buy it and use it, you have to renew the license annually The page you linked to says otherwise ("License: Pay Once"). In some cases the license is annual. > include in a web application that will be downloaded and installed by customers The page you linked to also includes this as a licensing option, no? ("App: for embedding in mobile applications")
Fantastic font, now infinitely malleable! Unfortunately it is expensive, and you can't just buy it and use it, you have to renew the license annually. https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mti/helvetica-now-variable?tab... And my use case isn't even covered: include in a web application that will be downloaded and installed by customers. My current choice is OpenSans https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans
My God if you didn't tee this up perfectly:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090422173924/http://diveintoma...
> FUCK THE FOUNDRIES
> Seriously. Fuck them. They still think they’re in the business of shuffling little bits of metal around. You want to use a super-cool ultra-awesome totally-not-one-of-the-11-web-safe-fonts? Pick an open source font and get on with your life.
> I know what you’re going to say. I can hear it in my head already. It sounds like the voice of the comic book guy from The Simpsons. You’re going to say, “Typography is by professionals, for professionals. Free fonts are worth less than you pay for them. They don’t have good hinting. They don’t come in different weights. They don’t have anything near complete Unicode coverage. They don’t, they don’t, they don’t…”
> And you’re right. You’re absolutely, completely, totally, 100% right. “Your Fonts” are professionally designed, traditionally licensed, aggressively marketed, and bought by professional designers who know a professional typeface when they see it. “Our Fonts” are nothing more than toys, and I’m the guy showing up at the Philadelphia Orchestra auditions with a tin drum and a kazoo. “Ha ha, look at the freetard with his little toy fonts, that he wants to put on his little toy web page, where they can be seen by 2 billion people ha h… wait, what?”
> Let me put it another way. Your Fonts are superior to Our Fonts in every conceivable way, except one:
> WE CAN’T FUCKING USE THEM
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also incredibly risky for advertising and marketing campaigns. I had one client that started getting their product catalog scraped aggressively, and the invoice for their licensed font usage that month was an order of magnitude higher than they expected (low six figures, vs. low five figures). They slapped the site behind an aggressively configured enterprise WAF[1] in response to that bill specifically. It made…
If one is going through those lengths to influence a page view counter, couldn’t one just report a different number? What did the WAF even do?
‣ You were not allowed to self-host the font files, and had to load them directly from the hosting URL provided by the font foundry
‣ There was no explicit reporting involved. Every time the font resource was downloaded from their server, the foundry counted that as a licensed pageview.
‣ The foundry used cache control headers[1] on the response, so that every page load required contacting their origin server and could be logged for billing purposes.
‣ The foundry sent an invoice, telling you what your usage was. If your resource download/pageview count was within your contractual limit, you're invoiced your base rate. If your pageview count was above your contractual rate, you pay your base rate + whatever your overage cost was.
The WAF did a bunch of stuff, but the primary headache was that they enabled challenge pages[2] for every single visitor as a knee-jerk reaction, with a ridiculously low validity timeframe. So every user got hit with an interstitial Javascript challenge page on first pageload, and if they stuck around for just a bit they'd get hit with another one out of nowhere. And that "other one" could easily be on a background resource load rather than the primary page itself, which would just hang. And the way the interstitial page loaded the final content for traffic that "passed the test" obliterated referral information and made it impossible to make heads or tails of your traffic data.
The intent being that automated traffic wouldn't get past the WAF and would never load the actual destination page, and by extension the precious font files. But the way it operated had a lot of nasty side effects that caused a never-ending stream of technical problems, in addition to just being a terrible user experience.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...
[2] https://www.imperva.com/blog/how-incapsula-client-classifica...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose if you manually traced Helvetica letters, then they might have a case for misusing their font. After all, there isn't a licensing option that allows you to use the font as a template.
But what if the tracing was done by a consumer who visited a website containing the Helvetica™ font?
I'd assume the license for viewing the file is implied, but I have no clue if it would hold up in court if you viewed the file -> traced the output (which is copying the typeface, not the font.)
Fantastic font, now infinitely malleable! Unfortunately it is expensive, and you can't just buy it and use it, you have to renew the license annually. https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mti/helvetica-now-variable?tab... And my use case isn't even covered: include in a web application that will be downloaded and installed by customers. My current choice is OpenSans https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans
> And my use case isn't even covered: include in a web application that will be downloaded and installed by customers. My current choice is OpenSans https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans My God if you didn't tee this up perfectly: https://web.archive.org/web/20090422173924/http://diveintoma... > FUCK THE FOUNDRIES > Seriously. Fuck them. They still think they’re in the business of shuffling little bits of metal…
We have literally got to the point of commisioning fonts so we don't have to worry about licensing (bonus: we will also be able to make them freely available, and hopefully fully open source too).
Do you genuinely notice differences between fonts? I have a general sense of monospaced vs proportional and serif vs sans-serif. Past that it's mostly all the same to me and I'm kind of impressed that people pay so much attention to the tiny details (and maybe questioning whether they really do or whether fonts are kind of like wine tasting).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Unfortunately it is expensive, and you can't just buy it and use it, you have to renew the license annually. Not even that. If you want it for a web page you have to pay in blocks of page views. In my mind that moves it from "eh" to "LOL no". These are licensing terms for people who want the name.
So I need to develop a view counter for my static website? Not sure how to do that. Why do I need to pay for search engines crawling my website?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If one is going through those lengths to influence a page view counter, couldn’t one just report a different number? What did the WAF even do?
In the case of the font foundry my client was licensing from, ‣ You were not allowed to self-host the font files, and had to load them directly from the hosting URL provided by the font foundry ‣ There was no explicit reporting involved. Every time the font resource was downloaded from their server, the foundry counted that as a licensed pageview. ‣ The foundry used cache control headers[1] on the response, so that e…