Hi Chris,

the last time I went head-to-head with a designer preaching "free fonts for the masses" on a predominantly UK graphic designers forum he resorted to "name-calling" on his last comment. The other posters found my remarks favorable to both designers and type invested companies alike. Once you begin chipping away at the fabric of another's argument they often have no ground to retreat on.

I jumped on via your link and sometime later today I will post in a kind and gentle manner until it gets ugly.

Gee... what should my pseudonym be this time?
-- "V for Vendetta"?

Norbert,
as long it is not P for pirate :-)

ChrisL

No...

P is for Enablex! ;-)

Whooops, gotta run! :-)

ChrisL

Yeah, the usual bullshit arguements. I think the main thing here is that the screen environment is totally different to the printed one, so adapting Caslon for the web is a tad silly. There are only so many iterations of pixels that can be developed for decent, readable body copy fonts and the microsoft cleartype stuff will fill quite a few holes methinks. As for display fonts, there are plenty of 'fun' ones to play with.

—K

I don’t have to have a font to read a book, so why do I have to have it to read a website?

I don't need gas (petrol) to ride a bike. Free gas for everyone!

Was the book free?

ChrisL

Perhaps type designers should publish their "five steps to graphic design freedom" Why should the 'creatives' keep their templates and tricks to themselves? All photosphop filters and 'best of' design annuals must be in the public domain! ;-)

But then the illustrators will publish their manifesto for free rights to all photographs, and the photographers will hang a banner listing their demands for whatever they think should be free and the whole thing will escalate into a creative civil war.

I will go for it if everything is free including, rent, food, travel, clothes, etc.

ChrisL

Sounds like your army days, Chris :-)

Hi, I wrote the article on Be A Design Group, and I am really dissappointed by the comments I see here. Why would typophiles object to rich typography for the masses? I can understand concern over piracy issues, etc, but surely there is a part of you that want to see a way for your fonts to be seen by everyone online. That is what I would like to see, and I think there are ways of making it happen without putting type designers out of business.

I am also offended by the snobbery I perceive in comments like "It’s written by a designer, not a type-centric person." Well, no I don't design fonts, but you aren't going to find a person more typography sympathetic than me or the majority of designers out there. We are on your side! Rather than visiting our site looking for a battle, try reading it as the designer's friends and partners. That is what you are, right?

I read the article last night. The concern for better typography on the internet is definitely valid, the five solutions, however, are poorly constructed and seem to come from an underlying contempt for the people who make and distribute typefaces. I better argument might have involved a little more research into internet and font technologies rather than a bunch of emotional crap about the greed, selfishness, and pride of type designers.

> We are on your side!

I truly agree, Adrian, that essentially graphic designers and type designers are on the same side. Both parties are devoted to the viewer's experience.

The initial posting suggests --
The font companies own the fonts, and any attempt to set them free is going to meet strong resistance. But what if there were legal ways to give fonts to the masses? Wouldn’t you support any effort to increase the options for web fonts?

My own comment is a response to flawed thinking, not on the wish to create better viewing experiences for internet visitors.

Buckminster Fuller's parable about the businessman and the grand piano is all about thinking a solution that worked for a given situation is the best or only approach to solving the core problem.

Just because someone did a great job with font selection on a web site does not mean that public availability to the BEST or most popular fonts is a solution to better web communications. That simply is not a wise or forward thinking approach.

Font formats and technology can be and most likely will be re-invented by the large corporate manufacturers of hardware and systems software who have billions of dollars at stake.

If you bought a cassette recording of your favorite album years ago, did you rebuy it once the CD became available? Same thing with video tapes being replaced by DVDs.

Now remember, if a typeface designer/font manufacturer originally designed a face for phototypesetters, it had to be completely revisited and re-manufactured for PostScript, TrueType, OpenType, et al. Each time a font format changes, the designer or font manufacturer needs to revisit the entire design, many times adding scores of new characters to fill out the new font requirements.

Graphic designers are usually hired to produce a project and few would ever do a job that the client hadn't decided whether to pay for or not. Type designs are worked on, created and produced into fonts whether anyone is going to buy them or not. Creating three type families of four style weights each (regular, italic, bold, bold italic) adds up to twelve products that may never be purchased. Hardly a way to make a gainful living. The phrase "free fonts" is an invitation to fight.

I tend to agree with Jackson. In hindsight it might have been better to do some basic research around fonts and the Web. I think if you'd asked some basic questions here (or another font forum) before posting the manifesto you might have come up with some other findings.

I think there's a bit of missing the forest for the trees here, because many people here are putting so much time into the trees, which is perfectly understandable. There are two groups here that should be applauding each other and cheering at collective successes, but somehow we always seem to end up fighting over who has to pay for dinner...

Perhaps a recognition of the gap as an opportunity is the key. We know what ticks us off, how can we band together and fix it?

My faith is semi-restored after the last several comments. I can't deny the "anarchy" flavor that my essay contained, but I hope you agree that my intentions are good. I would be curious to hear what you guys think about an open source model for fonts. Do you think it is possible? Would you support such a movement?

I posted this response on Adrian's site:

Norbert has it exactly right. The problem is nothing to do with the font companies or font designers. And they certainly aren’t greedy - if they were, they’d be in another line of business.

The overwhelming majority of type vendors and designers already set their fonts for “preview and print” embedding, or some more liberal setting. They’ve already done their part.

The problem is that there is no universally accepted solution for font embedding on the web. I think Adrian sort of gets that, but he seems to think that it’s up to the font folks to solve. But really this is a problem for the web folks to solve - perhaps with input from the font people.

Any of the previous solutions that relied on distributing fonts for end users to install up front has been fundamentally flawed. insofar as it keeps designers using a handful of fonts that are universal, and relies on something largely outside of their control - that the user already has the font installed. Even if the fonts are freely available, the web is too much of an instant-gratification medium for web designers to be able to rely on people installing specific fonts just to view a site.

The W3C is considering a new mechanism that would allow a reference to a font in a specified format on the web site, perhaps in a Zip file. That’s an improvement, because it gets the font automatically loaded - but you’d still be limited to free fonts, which isn’t very exciting. And convincing the rights-holders that they should give their work away isn’t going to work here any more than it did in the music industry.

Still, it’s a big problem. You need to convince the folks who own the web browsers and the web authoring applications that there’s a big market for a solution. The font foundries already know this and most of them are as eager for a good solution as you are.

Regards,

T

I would be curious to hear what you guys think about an open source model for fonts. Do you think it is possible? Would you support such a movement?

http://typophile.com/node/16620

And another couple...

http://typophile.com/node/13565

http://typophile.com/node/14560

So far these seem to have gathered little traction.

> Norbert has it exactly right.

Thanks, Thomas, for the acknowledgement.
Wow... this is something I need to show my wife right away!

---------------------------------

FYI -- My encounter with Buckminster Fuller
While attending Cooper Union in the late sixties, I volunteered with other "artists" to stage a "Happening" at a major conference at NYU on the future of media. Among the keynote speakers were Bucky Fuller and Marshall McLuhan, and the attending audience was filled with luminaries such as Andy Warhol, who made a personal statement by sitting in the lounge during the entire conference reading the New York Times.

Fuller used a variant of the "Businessman and Piano" parable in his speech, the original version I found later in one of his essays on problem solving. I've rarely made a reference to this, since on one occasion I got blank stares and questioned, "What does THAT have to do with the problem at hand?".

Fuller was one of a handful of individuals who broke down and reshaped how I approach problem solving. As a result, I would rather teach how not to design thus opening the door to creative processing.
Most people want "IT" now with little regard to whether it truly makes sense.

Buckminster Fuller was a genius. His approach to design and problem solving is truly something to be admired. I wish more people were willing to take his approach to problem solving.

It seems to me that some of these issues are getting a little mixed up. Even if you were giving Helvetica away, web designers would still be forced to specify Arial for the depressing reason that its guaranteed to be installed on 99% of computers already. Its the same reason people cater to other arguably inferior products (IE 6, Windows Media, etc) when their own preferred technologies are being given away.

The only way we can even dream of having, well, if not good then at least diverse typography on the internet is by developing a system that enables designers to embed typefaces into a document (not a browser) while still observing copyright law. sIFR is a good example of this (or the use of embedded fonts in any flash for that matter). Or maybe it isn't. Though its technically flawed, its an attempt at something that seems worthwhile. It utilizes fairly ubiquitous technology, and works independent of browsers (an important factor if we want to have any reasonable hope of consistent rendering.) Any thoughts on this?

"We know what ticks us off, how can we band together and fix it?"
Crazy glue Jobs, Gates, Chizem(?) and the W3C to each other and tickle them with low resolution fraction bars until they agree on true peace for users?

" In hindsight it might have been better to do some basic research around fonts and the Web." :-oh I thought you did, and found: Everybody wants anti-aliased Italic, preferably copies of popular fonts you don't want to license for real, and they want them hinted and rasterized in an environment that no one has...oh, and funnel them into a format that excites practically no one but makes sure no viral fonts are distributed through use, which they can't be anyway, 'cause the popes can't get together on a std. web format WITH hints...I guess the font industry should be thoroughly whipped for all this.

These points were made long ago on this forum, that Adobe and Apple started the font wars and never made the peace required by users and developers to go on (until recently, but alas). This then caused the web to be typographically illiterate, where it remains, and subsequently has forced users to choose only from fonts that have been prepaid for them by the Adobe, MS and Apple and so are freely available to all. I made all this known in the mid-90's after a third design conference where the finger was pointed at ME as a representative of the source of the problem with fonts on the web. I laughed then, but after a decade of no progress in this area, it's not so funny, I guess (I don't go to design conferences much any more ;)). The best retort to this after all these years, is that there is no need for good type on the web, 'cause there is no possibility for good typography.

Maybe when "they" make it possible to choose "any point size". Maybe when "they" make it possible to tune the color of type. Maybe when "they" enable H&J. Leading anyone? Portability, fidelity, and basic typographic functionality are sorely lacking on the web as a result of the poor leadership and inadequate evangelization from positions of supposed responsibility (and supposed typographic fraternity) in these companies. Until that is solved, we are the whipping boys and girls, boys and girls. My conscience is clear on this, and I would put 100 web fonts on the market in 12 months if there was a market that could employ our quality, and pay for it.

David,

I find it a bit difficult to follow all of your arguments here. There have been proprietary attempts to solve this problem. Some have been failures, Embedded OpenType (.EOT) and Bitstream’s TrueDoc (.PFR), and some have been more successful like Flash and PDF.

However what a large section of the web design community, all the browser makers (especially those based on open source code) and the W3C wants is an open published standard, which means that the blueprints for any format be in the public domain, allowing for the conversion of retail fonts to the embedded font format (and of course the conversion of embedded fonts back into usable regular fonts). This is a plan I don’t think type designers will buy into, and I don't blame them.

As Tom mentioned the W3C’s fallback plan seems to be support for public domain and freeware fonts .zipped up and attached to pages with a documented mechanism on how browsers should temporarily install the fonts. If this plan makes it into the CSS standard you can expect this to be supported in standards-compliant browsers quite quickly.

Cheers, Si

"I find it a bit difficult to follow all of your arguments here."
I'm not surprised, I'm not arguing. I'm telling. Telling that even with the best fonts in the world online, the typography still looks like something that stuck to the bottom of your shoe, no? Telling you that users want more choices in points, more options for composition and better results through science, not hokum, no?

"However what a large section of the web design community, all the browser makers (especially those based on open source code) and the W3C wants is an open published standard, which means that the blueprints for any format be in the public domain, allowing for the conversion of retail fonts to the embedded font format (and of course the conversion of embedded fonts back into usable regular fonts)"

Making assumptions about what "type designers" do and don't want? e.g. The Blueprints of the current formats ought to be in the Public Domain, the conversion of any font into an embedded font should be on every PC in the known universe. Do you actually expect us to believe that the reason we don't have portable, hi-fi web type is because of developer sensitivity to our industry!?

Based on 20 years of evidence, beginning with Adobe's "100 fonts should be enough", through PDF and knock-off licensing at the highest levels, to today's shrill cry of "hey look! YET ANOTHER RASTERIZER",,, I find it very hard to believe that the font industry's concerns come anywhere near being as damaging to our industry as the perception in the general designing public that it is the type design industry, and its "monopoly" that has squelched web design...

> Do you actually expect us to believe that the reason we don’t have portable, hi-fi web type is because of developer sensitivity to our industry!?

You don’t need to believe me but it’s true. Of course its not the only reason - browser makers and the W3C not really caring about typography is a bigger factor, but every time the open standards issue comes up there are a handful of voices here that make the valid argument that without the support of the majority of font makers you’re wasting your time. If you think I'm making this up, perhaps you could confirm this off-line with Greg.

I wonder if the "pay to author" model is best here. Is there another model? "Pay to view" certainly isn't going to work. "Welcome to Typophile. To veiw this site, please purchase Gotham and Mercury." By the way, it's not just websites that are going to have this problem. I know that this is going to shock some folks here, but the printing press is going away. It might not be next week, but it's going to happen. All type will be digital. For all the type designers who are afraid of embedded fonts: either we figure something out or everything from books to phones will be TNR/Arial, or whatever preinstalled flavor of the week. We will take the font choice out of the designers hands. Designers are the ones who value and will buy new type. Take away their ability to spec new type, and no one is buying new type.

Think about it. If designers could use a new font on every web site, phone, ebook, signage system, etc, they would. And they would pay for it, or even better, get their client to pay for it.

I think that PDF/Flash are headed in the right direction. While they don't completely protect fonts from piracy, most people don't know how/won't go to effort to rip the font data out. A pdf style embedded format + css support would solve a lot of problems. While I hate DRM as a consumer and as a lover of free (as in freedom) information, future software/hardware will give type designers a lot more power to control who is using their fonts, and what they are using it for.

All type will be digital.

gosh, i hope that's not any time soon!

It will be sooner than people think. Of course there will still be books, but they will serve a different purpose as art objects. Already physical newspapers are beginning to wilt. The same is true for annual reports. Next will be paperbacks. But that is a different thread.

In the mean time, we need to be looking ahead to what the font industry will do to take advantage of the more flexible and content hungry medium of the data driven screen. Will the content all be textual, with default fonts and smatterings of images as it is on the web? Or will type be a vehicle of expression as it is with print. We can help decide.

Embedding is the only way for this to happen. It can happen in one of two ways. 1) Device makers will commission fonts for their devices, and all dynamic content on these devices will be drawn in these fonts. Or 2) the devices will support open formats that allow the content authors to embed fonts. If we go with option one, we will have a very restricted type pallete and very few type designers will make money selling custom designs to device manufacturers. If we go with option two, the market will be much broader, and the content on our devices will be way cooler. Go open embedding standards!

Of course there will still be books, but they will serve a different purpose as art objects.
Leading to the great letterpress renaissance, perhaps. When physical books are "premium" goods, I assume that more readers will be willing to learn the value of letterpress, if only to display their good taste.

Here's a thought:

What if there was an independent organization which would make fonts available to the general public for use on the web (mainly). The organization would negotiate a license fee with font developers to secure the right to do this on a font-by-font or family-by-family basis. The fees, of course, would have to be enough to offset the probable loss that would by incurred by the font developer for having his/her fonts freely available. It would have the advantage that no new font format would need to be developed. This is already being done to some extent with fonts bundled with operating systems, so it's not a totally radical idea.

The only big downside I can see in this scenario (one that Nick Shinn will probably have thought of already) is that it could have a chilling effect on the development and sale of fonts not privileged to be licensed by such an organization. It would be the bundled font problem squared. Or maybe not. The question is, who are buying fonts now and would they buy fewer in such a scenario? Perhaps fonts not in the pool would be more highly valued by designers, just as many of them shun bundled fonts now. I don't know.

> The bullet points are:
1. Convince the Font Companies to Surrender Their Monopoly

I don't know if anyone has pointed this out, but if there is more than one company, it's not a monopoly.

Digital type forced "The Font Companies" to surrender their monopoly years ago. People were only bound to a font company when they still produced very expensive output equipment that only worked on their own fonts. Today, fonts are dirt cheap and not locked into any special equipment.
I would like to clarify the difference between "digital" type which is used for printing, and "screen type" (or pixel based type) which is meant to be read on a monitor.

ChrisL

Mark is right but it is even further than that. When their were a few type giants with their proprietary equipment competing with each other, you could have said they were "The Man" and poor soul graphic designers and type buyers were beholding to them. Today, there is no THE Man. Type designers are little cottage industry guys who work out of their modest houses for less money than graphic designers make.

ChrisL

Among the keynote speakers were Bucky Fuller and Marshall McLuhan, and the attending audience was filled with luminaries such as Andy Warhol, who made a personal statement by sitting in the lounge during the entire conference reading the New York Times.

Norbert, I envy your encounter with Fuller; I have often found myself completely turned around by his unique way of approaching problems. Along with Lewis Mumford and Ernst Cassirer, Fuller was one of the true visionaries of the twentieth century.

Since I attended a small, conservative Catholic college in the 1960s, I also had occasion to meet Marshall McLuhan (yes, a conservative Catholic), whom I found far more approachable and actually interested in talking with (rather than down to) students than William F. Buckley (also a conservative Catholic, who had a nephew attending the college). And, oddly enough, connections through this same college (long and involved story) allowed me to meet Andy Warhol: all I can say about Andy is that he was a mighty fine shoe illustrator who looked into the soul of America, and learned its deepest, darkest secrets of shameless self-promotion. Everything that Steve Jobs is today he owes to Andy...

When I was a very young design assistant at Westinghouse Corporate design Center in 1968, The Westinghouse vice presidents contracted Bucky Fuller to come and give a talk in our office conference room. It was mostly for senior staff and the big wheel suits but I got to come along to take pictures of the event. As everyone was going in to the room, Bucky was at the door and was being introduced to all the upper staff. Bucky quickly noticed that only the suits were being introduced to him. He countered the measure by asking the VP, "but who is that?" (pointing to the secretary) and "Who is that?" (pointing to me). He walked over and gave a warmer and very sincere greeting to all the unannounced than to all the big wheels. He gave a fantastic talk about consciousness to design needs of the world being more important than profit only thinking.
I will never forget him for being a caring human being (and for seeking me out to say hello).
When I find the pictures I took of him, I will post one.

ChrisL

W3C did their part of the job back in 1998 and specified it in CSS2:
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/fonts.html#referencing

This is the syntax that IE has been using.

It is beyond W3C’s scope to define the technical implementation of their specifications, the nature of linked in resources and the protection of data linked in and used on a web page. To understand this, think about how images are working on web pages: W3C have defined how to point to image resources and how to control the appearance of images on the web page, but they have never defined what kind if image formats a browser should support, how the rendering engine should work or how image ownership should be protected.

/mårten

"every time the open standards issue comes up there are a handful of voices here that make the valid argument that without the support of the majority of font makers you’re wasting your time. If you think I’m making this up, perhaps you could confirm this off-line with Greg."

I don't tink you are making this up. I trust you, but don't understand the difference between what we have now, and an "Open Standard." The only thing that flash won't do, e.g. is produce quality type on the screen. There is nothing to stop anyone from using any fonts with flash is there?

Sorry for being late to th discussion here, but the core problem here is much more basic:
The web is being used in a way it was never designed for.
The reason that HTML (and it's descendants) do not have a good way of dealing with fonts is that the medium was built around CONTENT, not APPEARANCE. This has been lost along the way. The intention of HTML was a markup language, a way to convey the information, with the appearance having options only as necessary to aid in the understanding of the information. The idea was that each viewer would see it in a different font, and that was OK. The content was the important thing.

Now, I'm not saying that intent is even valid. In the business we are in, I think most of us believe that separating content from appearance is not valuable, and separating appearance from understanding is even futile. But the point is that we've been trying to "tweak" this technology for the past 15 years to make it do something that's essentially in opposition to it's original purpose. We probably should have made a real paradigm shift a decade or so ago, and perhaps that's still what we need, as far as the type of document that's transmitted on the web.

jason: your point is well taken, but I think the story of HTML is a little more complicated than that. Strict separation of structure from presentation is one of the philosophical threads behind the creation of HTML, but early HTML was just as strongly influenced by pragmatic implementors who didn't mind putting in tags for appearance either. It's too bad those early decisions were all made by people with no typographic sophistication, but that's a separate issue. I find it at least plausible that the success of HTML is due to its success at hybridizing the two philosophies, rather than being slavish to just structure (as is the case for many XML technologies today, like RSS), or just presentation (as in PostScript and less-enlightened PDF).

This discussion is based on weither the end user cares about type at all. The browsers will just substitute something simular based on a heirarcy. Is the font more important than the content of the message? I wouldn't cave in to designers who want to change the media at the expense of other peoples creativity and effort. If you create something (writing, type, design) you deserve to be fairly compensated. End of argument.

A well-known artist was asked Why do work for money?
He replied asking And what for do you work?
I work for fame, was the answer.
Then you work for fame and I work for money, replied the artist.
________________________
Sadly, I need all the help I can get in this enterprise.

I'd rather risk going to jail by aquiring something illegally than purchase something with a DRM.

Whats the deal with embedding fonts in flash? Is there a way to steal them that way?

What about licensing fonts under a creative commons licenses that forbids commercial use?

Finally found the pictures!

http://www.graphicart-news.com/2011/07/feel-power-of-buckminster-fullers...

A lot of people are doing steps 3, 4, and 5. Fortunately, this hasn't significantly contributed to the problems faced by the people who design type for a living... a generally thankless and poorly-paid task.

Given that situation, it is not so much that clarion cries to "liberate" type are perceived as threatening, as that type designers are left bemused by the belief that there's really much of a problem left to be fixed.

However, while there are open-source versions of Times Roman, Helvetica, Baskerville, and even Century Schoolbook, and there are decent freeware (if not open-source) comic-book fonts too (even if one doesn't count the Blambot ones due to their restricted license), it is true that there's no good free substitute for Papyrus yet. Or Comic Sans!

However, if one perceives it as a major problem that a free Linux distribution can't include the same variety of fonts as are included with, say, Corel products (which license a major chunk of the Bitstream catalogue) then this cry to "liberate" fonts would make sense, and I suspect this is the sort of thinking that is behind this - the free software world is to match what the pay software world does in every respect, until Microsoft, Corel, Oracle, and many other companies end up giving their products away and exist by selling support, just like Red Hat.

there's no good free substitute for Papyrus yet. Or Comic Sans!

Now there's an idea ;)

I'm too dumb to understand the half of what half of you are talking about.

Hey, understanding three-quarters of what is being discussed here isn't bad!