Grant says, “it’s all good.”

good to know it won’t affect the type aspect of Veer.

As I pointed out in the old thread about this that got nuked, I’m pretty sure this is all about the human capital. Veer knows how to build a great stock library, how to market it, and how to sell it. Corbis sucks at most of that (excluding the massive historic image library) and I’m sure that Veer’s success is hurting them. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Corbis stock images moved under the Veer brand with the historic stuff treated as another stock library Veer licenses and sells. As for the type, given the way Corbis has been built up via acquisition, maybe those TYPE stock certificates will become collector’s items in the future…

So, Veer is now owned by Bill Gates. That sounds about right. Veer doesn’t have illustrators, photographers, film-makers, or type designers on staff; they are a vendor. Type is a commodity, like stock illustration, photography, or footage. It’s there to be sold. It’s all about the bottom line. While the Veer type library is “curated” unlike the free-for-all at MyFonts, the result is the same. Another “independent foundry” bites the dust? Don’t make me laugh.

Veer doesn’t have illustrators, photographers, film-makers, or type designers on staff; they are a vendor.

Are you absolutely, 100% sure of that, James? Do their monthly catalogs get made by themselves?

>Do their monthly catalogs get made by themselves?

I would imagine they do this the old fashioned way, ie use “Graphic Designers”, who may be in house, or who may be India, or Vancouver or some god-forsaken place - they don’t send me the catalogs so I’ll never know :-(

As well as being a distributor, Veer does publish some brands of type and image, such as Jukebox, Solus, and Fancy.
Several of the Umbrella fonts are exclusive to Veer.

Thanks, Nick. Also, Grant is a typeface designer. :-)

True, he has made some fonts in the past, but none of them are sold by Veer (yet).

Hum that’s kind of sad. In the back of my mind I wanted to work at Veer for a while now but things never came together for that to happen.

Guess I’ll have a to find another (cool) Canadian company.

>Guess I’ll have a to find another (cool) Canadian company.

http://tbe.taleo.net/NA3/ats/careers/searchResults.jsp?org=corel&cws=1

Jesus.. Corel? You are a funny guy, sii.

Although Veer may employ some graphic designers in-house to make their marketing materials, this is not the same as having actual content development taking place in-house.

I can’t find any webpages showing any of Mr Hutchinson’s published designs. Therefore, I feel pretty safe in stating that he is not a type designer.

There is nothing wrong with being a vendor. Making stuff is hard; it’s much easier to just sell it.

>You are a funny guy, sii.

Thanks!

>Therefore, I feel pretty safe in stating that he is not a type designer.

Well he contributed here... http://typophile.com/node/38314 so unless he’s just trying to swing the vote in favor of OSX ;-) he self-identifies himself as a type designer - and that’s all that counts.

http://www.identifont.com/show?8YC

My apologies to Mr Hutchinson. It looks like he made a lot of groundbreaking work which was then ripped off by Neville Brody.

Hello folks.

I wish I could have stuck my nose into this thread a bit sooner. I was just waiting for a bit of the dust from last week’s news to settle.

Yes, everything is indeed good.

As an addendum to the clarifications by Nick, Stephen and Ricardo (thank you all), I would like to reinforce the fact that Veer does have a large in-house stock photography production and art department. We are currently building out four brands of photography: Fancy [1], Solus [2], Dear [3], and the Latin-American focused Somos [4].

[1] http://www.veer.com/fancy/
[2] http://www.veer.com/solus/
[3] http://www.veer.com/dear/
[4] http://www.veer.com/somos/

As for typeface development, I am but the sole type designer (of sorts) and technician on staff. However, we work very closely with Jason Walcott on adding new faces to our Jukebox [5] collection. Likewise, Alejandro Paul, Stephen Rapp, Christian Robertson and others are all significant contributors to the exclusive typefaces in our Umbrella [6] library. This year, we acquired the Mean Tangerine [7] foundry for its solid lineup of pixel fonts, and are working with Tyler Young, continuing to build out this great collection. Finally, we just soft-launched Cabinet [8], an embryonic new collection of text and titling faces - Stefan Hattenbach of Macrhino is producing exclusive families for us in this context.

[5] http://www.veer.com/jukebox/
[6] http://www.veer.com/umbrella/
[7] http://www.veer.com/meantangerine/
[8] http://www.veer.com/cabinet/

See, we’ve been busy.

@Jonathan We’re still cool. I promise that isn’t about to change.

@Si I’m truly sorry about the lack of catalogues ... I honestly can’t explain why you never see them. It’s not like we have a zip code block on Redmond.

@James No apologies needed. Although I think it may have been me riffing on the work of the mid-80s Mr Brody, rather than the other way around. I was a very impressionable aprés art college grad.

A more recent example of by type design exploits can be witnessed in this Type Battle: Triline Pixel Font

http://www.typophile.com/battle03

> http://tbe.taleo.net/NA3/ats/careers/searchResults.jsp?org=corel&cws=1

heh.

Actually, my wife’s uncle works there as a copywriter.

“@James No apologies needed. Although I think it may have been me riffing on the work of the mid-80s Mr Brody, rather than the other way around. I was a very impressionable aprés art college grad.”

And I was in my high school band. Does that make me a professional musician?

Wow, James, you seem to have a beef with lots of people here:

http://typophile.com/node/39004

There’s way too much nicey-nicey, and too little reality on this site. I’m trying to redress the balance.

I’m trying to redress the balance.

Well, there’s this famous old proverb that goes something like, “He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.”

Also, there’s this thing called respect for your fellow colleagues, or designers, or forum members. It usually cuts both ways.

There’s way too much nicey-nicey, and too little reality on this site.

God forbid some little corner of the internet should be devoted to civil discourse between friends and peers.

NewGuy> I agree there is too much nicey nicey here too. But you don’t need to combat that with nastiness as you have been doing. You can be firm without being caustic.

We all know that Getty could never buy Veer. So if there was to be a buyer, it would have to be Corbis. I’m just surprised that Corbis bought Veer, and not the other way round. (Yeah, right, I know.) =)

The strange twist is that Microsoft now owns Veer and my old stomping grounds, Razorfish. (Is there a strategy in there to buy an entire supply/value chain?)

I’m going to laugh again later about the Corel comment.

Just to clarify ... Microsoft has no direct affiliation with or ownership of Corbis. It’s a William H. Gates solo gig. He’s the only connection, and it’s privately held.

This is true, no discount on hoodies or belt buckles :-(

Si

PS. I’ve been telling my Corbis friends for years that they should start acquiring access to font libraries “like Veer does”. They took this a bit far. ;-)

We all know that Getty could never buy Veer.

Would there really be a difference? The last time I did a Getty search all the images I saw were old enough to be down there in Corbis’ underground archive.

ba-da-BING!

Interesting that Veer is now “promoting” Zune...

http://blog.veer.com/archives/001688.html

;-)