Which is the best way to sell our typeface?
• Sign a contract with a distributor on its personal behalf or by the way of its own registred company, if there is one?
• If the company is chosen, are the royalties are transferable with his personal name if one dissolves or if the company is sold?
The last question seems like something you could easily iron out with the foundry in question... a matter of making provisions to the contract.
Mikey :-)
Too much obvious probably.
Thanks Mikey
I've been on contract with Berthold, Bitstream, Letraset. After a few years they end up on the URW++ font list and they will not pay me any royalties. I stopped making fonts 12 years ago because of the ease of pirating. My company was called Facsimile Fonts
and produced many fonts now in public domain.
forgive my ignorance, what is URW++?
See on that side: http://www.urwpp.de/english/home.html
Robert, the URL www.facsimilefonts is available, and Handle Gothic (or Handel New) could do with an Extra Light and an Extra Bold.
Not to mention condensed.
If you need some legal advice on this, Frank Martinez will be at TypeCon:
http://typophile.com/node/35216
You may also find some folk who would be interested in helping develop a classic like that for OpenType.
And others interested in distributing it.
The font business has changed a lot in 12 years, due to the Internet.
chopshop -- forgive my ignorance, what is URW++?
The former URW invented digital type as we know it today, i.e. describing letterforms as outlines rather than pixels.* Like the name of Gutenberg, this is a must-know for everyone doing digital type. :))
* Roger D Hersch & al: Electronic Publishing, Artistic Imaging, and Digital Typography. Springer 1998, isbn 3-540-64298-6, pp 265-280.
As I understand it, the new way is to form your own foundry, launch a website, but refer all customers to MyFonts, which will pay you 65% of each sale but give you visibility you could not possibly achieve on your own. Yes, you could sell directly from your website (see joshuadarden.com, a perfect example) but marketing and visibility count for as much as typeface merit.
Make full use of OpenType's advantages; be sure text faces have oldstyle figures for each font; be sure text families are released with at least two weights and matching italics, never leaving out bold italic; and be sure to keystroke-link all fonts the way the big foundries do.
I see that Handel Gothic has been redone with added weights by Rod McDonald for ITC (a.k.a. Monotype Imaging):
http://www.itcfonts.com/Fonts/NewFonts/2008/0308_HandelGothic.htm
No mention of Robert, though. It says that Don Handel designed it in the mid-Sixties.
...be sure text families are released with at least one weight...
Always a good idea.
Captured from commoncrawl.org on 27 Apr 2015. original URL