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More than 1,500 new fonts – including all-time favorites – come to Adobe Fonts

blog.adobe.com

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Re: More than 1,500 new fonts – including all-time favorites – come to Adobe Fonts

#11
post #6
post #4

> These fonts — along with more than 30,000 others — are already included in your Adobe Creative Cloud membership. For those wondering about pricing.

I always wonder how the licensing works with stuff like this. Say I create a logo with one of these fonts, and immediately cancel afterword. Do I get to continue using the logo? Or is my license to the font technically revoked? Also, font licensing elsewhere sucks for making native applications. They have this bizarre price structure where for web it's cheap, but if you want to embed it in an App it's 10x the price.…

The key thing to understand about typeface copyright is you can copyright the font file, but not the actual shape of the font (as that video you linked covers).

So say as you said, you had access to a font, you used it in a logo. Then you lost access. It's fine to keep using the logo, any assets you've created while you had access you can keep using. What you can't do is keep using that font file on your machine to start making making new assets. This is why for graphic design fonts are often licensed based on the number of machines they're installed on.

For web, it's often a subscription for a certain number of page views. If you no longer pay the subscription, then you're no longer allowed to serve the font file. Enforcing this however, is really tricky for foundries as you'd expect.

For app use, the license don't account for 'page views' as they figure it's impossible to track (and for the foundry to check). That's often why the figure is more for native apps. They're also kinda taking a guess that companies making apps pay more.

This is why a lot of big businesses will just outright 'buy' a font, so they have access forever with no limitations. If you're committing to a particular font for your brand, it often makes sense to just drop the cash and get it. It's also why so many really big companies just make or commission their own typefaces - it can be cheaper than trying to find some deal with a foundry. A good typeface will take one person about 2-3 years to make, but if you have 1k employees.... no biggie.

It's worth noting most serious foundries don't focus on 'small' customers - they're targeting very large businesses. The pricing doesn't scale down to most normal people, unfortunately - however if they did they'd be dramatically reducing income from the 'whales'. There's also undeniably a bit of price-value bias.

This all varies a bit foundry to foundry, but that's the most common setups and why.

Re: More than 1,500 new fonts – including all-time favorites – come to Adobe Fonts

#13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a common misunderstanding. Lots of SaaS have cheaper annual pricing. IIUC Adobe lets you get the cheaper annual pricing and then pay for it on a monthly basis. If you cancel early, you have to pay out the rest of your annual plan. This is no different than if you'd paid for it up front, and prevents people from signing up for the annual plan to get a cheaper monthly price and then canceling early.

It is a misunderstanding because Adobe deliberately obfuscates that fact when you purchase such a plan

Yes, it is really up to Adobe's marketing team to make sure that customers are not misunderstanding the plan. If the misunderstanding continues, then the government might end up stepping in.

Re: More than 1,500 new fonts – including all-time favorites – come to Adobe Fonts

#15
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a misunderstanding because Adobe deliberately obfuscates that fact when you purchase such a plan

Yes, it is really up to Adobe's marketing team to make sure that customers are not misunderstanding the plan. If the misunderstanding continues, then the government might end up stepping in.

Ahahahahahah! Not this government, that's for sure.

Re: More than 1,500 new fonts – including all-time favorites – come to Adobe Fonts

#16
post #4

> These fonts — along with more than 30,000 others — are already included in your Adobe Creative Cloud membership. For those wondering about pricing.

Yeah but it’s a huge pain. You can only use them within the creative cloud ecosystem- so just on Adobe products.

Re: More than 1,500 new fonts – including all-time favorites – come to Adobe Fonts

#17
lots of complaints here (for good reason) but really I have to applaud any try at staying in business with high quality fonts -- Adobe and others, too. The economics don't make sense for what is being handled. Keep trying new approaches..

Re: More than 1,500 new fonts – including all-time favorites – come to Adobe Fonts

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a common misunderstanding. Lots of SaaS have cheaper annual pricing. IIUC Adobe lets you get the cheaper annual pricing and then pay for it on a monthly basis. If you cancel early, you have to pay out the rest of your annual plan. This is no different than if you'd paid for it up front, and prevents people from signing up for the annual plan to get a cheaper monthly price and then canceling early.

It is a misunderstanding because Adobe deliberately obfuscates that fact when you purchase such a plan

If you look at their plans (https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html), and select "Annual, billed monthly", it pretty clearly says "Fee applies if you cancel after 14 days."

Re: More than 1,500 new fonts – including all-time favorites – come to Adobe Fonts

#19
post #9

> Arial — A universal favorite for presentations and business documents Because it used to* be available out of the box, everywhere. Not because it’s such a great typeface. I can’t imagine the sequence of short-sighted enterprise design decisions that puts someone in a position where they have to use Arial through Adobe Fonts. * I guess that’s no longer true because of Android?

Yes, Arial is hot garbage. It’s a Microsoft-sponsored rebadge of Helvetica, made because Microsoft didn’t want to license an actual good type face.

This is like calling beige office walls a “universal favorite.” And I bet people at Adobe today are still confused by their poor reception on Bluesky. They lost the ability to talk to their customers years ago. They only have prisoners now.

Re: More than 1,500 new fonts – including all-time favorites – come to Adobe Fonts

#20
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nono it’s $416/mo. And if you terminate before the 12 months is over then.. yes it’s $5,000

This seems like a common misunderstanding. Lots of SaaS have cheaper annual pricing. IIUC Adobe lets you get the cheaper annual pricing and then pay for it on a monthly basis. If you cancel early, you have to pay out the rest of your annual plan. This is no different than if you'd paid for it up front, and prevents people from signing up for the annual plan to get a cheaper monthly price and then canceling early.

There's seem to be a lot of reports for Adobe continuing to charge a credit card 12-18 months after confirmed cancellation and no recourse or anyone to access for help because the account is closed.

Sucks to say because I do like their software.

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