41–50 of 197 posts
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.
I wonder which is the most fully featured free Helvetica clone?
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.
I wonder which is the most fully featured free Helvetica clone?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
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
[1] https://booking.design/implementing-system-fonts-on-booking-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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). Mo…
I never understood under what circumstances you would really need a custom font. Could you say more about why that was the case?
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Typefaces should not be copyrightable. Print ones are not, it makes no sense that digital ones are.
In the US, "typefaces", ie. the shapes of the letters, generally are not. "Fonts", ie. the programs that draw the letters, are copyrighted as software, as something of a workaround. For more reading on the history here Typographica has a succinct overview[0]. [0] https://typographica.org/on-typography/copyright-protection-...
Will the bits/bytes of a TTF be different if two people produced identically the exact same shape of the letters?
EDIT: let me clarify a bit. The GP said that the shape of the letters is not copyrighted in the US. Which implies to me that if Helvetica has the exact shape of the letter "s" to be like so, and if I were to manually trace the exact same shape (curves, width, height of the letter, etc) that I can do that and resell it (or open source it)
What I'm asking is, what prevents someone from skipping the step all together of tracing every letter in the Helvetica alphabet and instead, just digitally copies the TTF font file?
Would the TTF font file I create from a manual tracing of the Helvetica alphabet be different than if I simply digitally copied the official Helvetica TTF file?
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.
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.
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).
Personally, I can't recognize specific fonts in the wild (especially Helvetica and its infinite lookalikes), but can certainly feel when a site uses an inappropriate font (usually too thin, but also things like using a UI font for longer-form text), to the extent I have a few userscripts that change some popular site's fonts to something more appropriate in my optinion.
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.
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).
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