FontSlice: Distribution Evolved

[David Jones]

aluminum: I can see the niche use where one needs to deal with a slogan or logotype or sign, perhaps. But I don't quite see how this would have much mass appeal.

I definitely see where you're coming from, but I do believe the mass appeal is there. If you look through the top 100 most-downloaded fonts of all time on dafont.com (a free font website), you'll find that most of these fonts are downloaded hundreds or thousands of times per day. You'll also notice that nearly every font in that list is a display font (very few would actually work for body text). The font market is massive, but I don't believe its currently in equilibrium; consumers can either pay $25 or $0 with very little in-between. FontSlice offers a simple model for bringing the market into equilibrium. People who may have never paid for a font before might be able to justify paying a dollar or two for a font through FontSlice. This will acclimate consumers to the idea of paying for high-quality fonts in general, which may expand the market even further.

[David Jones]

{More to come}

[aluminum]

"The font market is massive"

No doubt. But be careful assuming Dafont is any indicator of the font market.

But, best of luck. Hopefully something will come of it!

[Ralf H.]

I was first checking today's date to see if we already have April, 1st. But now that I think about it, there’s a fair chance it might work. It will of course stand or fall with the content of the font catalogue.
For the people who usually use Dafont or Google Webfonts you need to offer something special, which these sites don't have in order to have people pay for your fonts.
For the scenario of "recreating logotypes" you need to have all the classics from Monotype/Linotype first or it won't work.

From my foundry's point of view: If people can buy my fonts for a fraction of the regular price they pay at MyFonts, then your service would need to license a lot more of these subsetted fonts – otherwise I won't be too interested in participating.

[Té Rowan]

@Ralf – As I understand it, their business plan is to sell small subsets of fonts. A font with, say, a C, a D, a P and some custom kerning would be useful for a certain political party's identity but utterly bloody useless for anything else.

[paragraph]

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[dberlowgone]

I’m not sayin’ this kind of purchasing model isn’t right for anyone:

but for those who need to finalize the simulation of a design before the editorial work is complete, like, e.g. Roger Black, stopping composition to “buy a vowel” is a joke we talked about in the past.

there are 300,000 free, 80,000 commercial, 400,000 floating on the web and 5,000 or so people offering custom fonts, fonts & fonts. I think, and there’s plenty of evidence to back it up, that $25-$40 for great commercial fonts is not a barrier for someone who wants to pay something; while 15¢-$1.00 is too much of a barrier for someone who doesn’t want to pay anything.

technically this model is not a big deal for those who serve subset fonts to speed their way along the web. Off the web, serving identically named fonts potentially with 1,000’s of different glyph repertoires, and having those loose legally or illegally in local and wide area networks — is an IT/IP/I think/IC a nightmare.

it should be interesting, what vendors and what users will go for it.

Good luck David Jones!

[tourdeforce]

What if I firstly buy license for letters from A to G, then from H to M, then from N to T and from U to Z, and then do the same for a to z.

Would I get an set of A-Z + a-z cheaper then buying regular font license from i.e. MyFonts?

Edit:

Or if I understood it well (just saw your website), you will establish first the price of an font (i.e. $25 for full character set, like from i.e. MyFonts). Then based on (total) font price, you'll assign an "glyph price"?

I don't understand fully the way how will you determine the price of an glyph set the customer chosen to buy.

[Riccardo Sartori]

GT = The total number of glyphs in the font

So all glyphs are equal under the sky?

[marcox]

I think there's evidence from the success (however brief) of deeply discounted typefaces on MyFonts that $25-40 is actually a barrier to entry for some people. I've personally made impulse purchases when the price dips ridiculously low (as in $9 for a 6-weight display family). This is not same thing as purchasing a subset, but it does suggest that even professional and semi-pro users of type aren't immune to deep discounting.

[David Jones]

tourdeforce: Or if I understood it well (just saw your website), you will establish first the price of an font (i.e. $25 for full character set, like from i.e. MyFonts). Then based on (total) font price, you'll assign an "glyph price"?

Great question. The price for an unabridged font is established by the foundry. In most cases, it will be the same price as MyFonts and other distributors. When a user makes a purchase, the price is calculated using the following formula:

PF = The price of the unabridged font (set by the foundry)
GO = The number of old glyphs (purchased by the user in the past)
GN = The number of new glyphs (not yet purchased by the user)
GT = The total number of glyphs in the font
b = The sharpness of the pricing curve (normally set to 2)

Note that if the user purchases all glyphs in the first purchase, then GO must equal zero and GN must equal GT. Thus, the formula reduces to PF (the price of the unabridged font set by the foundry).

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any more questions.

[Riccardo Sartori]

By the way, hangman anyone? ;-)

[Don McCahill]

> So all glyphs are equal under the sky?

What? You want to buy the period and comma for a lower price than the g and the a, because they were easier to create? That is asking a bit much, I think.

[aluminum]

THIS WEEK ONLY: VOWELS 30% OFF! PUNCTUATION = BUY 2 GET ONE FREE!

:)

[David Jones]

riccard0: So all glyphs are equal under the sky?

You make a fair point Riccardo. Our pricing model does assume that each glyph represents an equal amount of effort, which is certainly an oversimplification. We realize that some characters require a great deal more effort than others. For example, building an accented character takes far less time than designing the components that it references. When we were designing our pricing model, we considered adding terms that would account for these different levels of complexity. In the end, however, we decided that the addition of such complexity would breed further complexity. We didn't want to end up with something akin to the U.S. tax code, so we decided to stick with a simple formula. However, our ears are open. If this pricing model doesn't work for the type community, then let's start that discussion.

[David Jones]

aluminum: THIS WEEK ONLY: VOWELS 30% OFF! PUNCTUATION = BUY 2 GET ONE FREE!

:)

Hmmm. Not a bad idea... :-)

[Riccardo Sartori]

You want to buy the period and comma for a lower price than the g and the a, because they were easier to create?

I was just asking, and surely not inferring that a comma is easier to create that an a.*
I was wondering if the price could be subject to market demand (either by charging more the most requested glyphs, or the more specialised ones).
For what is worth, I think the simpler the price plan is, the better.

* But probably it is more easily substituted with one from a different font (like the generic sorts of metal past).

[Riccardo Sartori]

THIS WEEK ONLY: VOWELS 30% OFF! PUNCTUATION = BUY 2 GET ONE FREE!

Hmmm. Not a bad idea.

Well, for some indy foundries, the "freemium" model has worked.
So, maybe a foundry could offer a limited number of glyphs for free (indefinitely, or for a limited time, or upon a newsletter subscription...).

[eliason]

To the operating system, two different abridged versions of the same font will appear to be identical. Thus, when you install the upgraded version, it will overwrite the older version. Some software applications will need to be restarted before they will recognize the upgraded font, but this is the case when installing any new font, abridged or not.

I wonder if, even still, you'll run into the caching problems that JamesT brought up. In my experience, if you keep reinstalling fonts with the same name, eventually you'll run into trouble like disappearing glyphs, etc.

[kentlew]

Those of us who regularly load and re-load versions of fonts during development know that Adobe’s font caches are notoriously prone to corruption and unpredictability under these circumstances. FWIW.

[aluminum]

"So, maybe a foundry could offer a limited number of glyphs for free"

Only fear there is a resurgence in the Ransom Note style. ;)

[dezcom]

Being an old fart and remembering what it used to cost to get a few lines of text set for one-time use, I have a tough time seeing how $25 dollars could be a barrier to anyone for the purchase of a font. I made a little experiment. I started off the sale of a display font with 640 glyph character set at what to me was a very under-priced $20 ( I felt that $35 was the fair price I should have set to begin with). Later, I put it on sale at half price [as in 50% off or only 10 bucks]. The funny thing is, I sold more fonts [units] in less time at $20 dollars that I did at half price by a two to one margin! Here is an example:
20 units @ $20 sold in TEN days equals $400
10 units @ $10 sold in THIRTY days equals $100 [this also came with added advertising on MyFonts on Sale list].

Clearly, the scrapbookers are not interested enough in my $10 dollar font to get anywhere near close to matching either sales or profits from the real professional type users who were happy to pay only $20 and perhaps were wondering to themselves, "There must be something wrong with this font if it only costs $20."

There are two ways to look at this. I could drop the price to a ridiculous five dollars to entice the scrapbookers or decide they are not worth the effort. For me to make five dollar fonts, they would need to be bare-bones minimum character set and not all that carefully done. There are plenty of folks happily making money doing this who are content with themselves and their work doing this. Hats off to them. For me, I just don't want to make shit and call it type just to make some money. I would so hate that! I might as well work at McDonalds and serve shit food at minimum wage. I would rather just ignore the hobby market and try to appeal to the people who really care about type. Maybe I will fail at that and misunderstand what the professional market wants, expects, and is willing to pay, but I can live with that kind of failure. I could not live with the other kind of failure though, where I make shit type that sells for shit but makes a profit because that market does not give a shit.

[butterick]

Certainly there’s room in the font world for new approaches to marketing and sales. For instance, Webtype and Typekit introduced the idea of subscription-based fonts as a way of meeting the needs of webfont customers.

Those services, however, actually exist. FontSlice’s service does not. So while I wish FontSlice well, as long as it has neither fonts nor customers, it’s not good enough to criticize (nor compliment).

[tourdeforce]

@ David Jones

What you're talking about in this topic is more or less like this:
http://www.photolettering.com

With few different points, but overall the concept is the same.

Am I right?

[David Jones]

tourdeforce: What you're talking about in this topic is more or less like this:
http://www.photolettering.com

With few different points, but overall the concept is the same.

Am I right?

There are certainly some similarities in our business models, but there are some major differences. At its core, FontSlice is just another font distributor. At any given time, FontSlice users could own any number of abridged and unabridged fonts, meaning that our platform could completely replace their previous distributor of choice. Our sights are set high: we want to be the MyFonts replacement. (I know, I know — that may take divine intervention — but why dream at all if you can't dream big?) We think we can get there by giving consumers more options.

Every font distributor has their niche — something that sets them apart from other distributors in hopes of encouraging consumers to shop there. Our niche will be incremental ownership; you can think of it as zero-interest financing for fonts. This concept doesn't come into play at Photo-Lettering. When a user purchases an abridged font on FontSlice, they are actually purchasing a font rather than a vector image. If they already own a portion of a font, they will have incentive to use it again for future projects, purchasing new glyphs as they go. Most importantly, users can still purchase entire fonts as they always have. Thus, FontSlice will be one-stop shopping for the font industry. Like I mentioned earlier, FontSlice will be the gateway drug into the font world. When users are ready to try the hard stuff, they'll already know a dealer. (Okay, maybe I should stop with the drug analogies...)