[OpenFontLibrary] Sample images

[Erik van Blokland]

On 14 apr 2009, at 16:48, Dave Crossland wrote:

> Obviously it will vary on the scope of the brief, but could you put
> numbers on that cost range for a typical roman/italic/bold/bold-italic
> serif text type? :-)

Ballpark, starting from scratch, 10 weeks solid work can be enough for  
a basic design of 2 styles in 2 weights, so 4 masters total. Excluding  
multiple figure ranges, extended diacritics, interpolations. Bringing  
it all  up to release quality, complete character set, fully developed  
features, kerning, another 5-10 weeks. Sometimes it's faster. Likely  
it will take more time. As complexity increases, more weights, more  
masters, interpolations, additional script and language support, time  
needed will multiply. Projects like the Microsoft core fonts or even  
the Liberation fonts (which are a bit thin on ideas, IMO) are much  
much more expensive.

Say 15-20 weeks or 600-800 hours at the low end, at whatever rate you  
want to work for. I know my minimum. Yours might differ on where you  
are in your life, where you live and how many mouths you're feeding.

Note that projects like this are never billed per hour, but it is an  
indication of at what level the entreprise becomes an expensive hobby  
rather than a business. As this is still a lot of money, custom design  
projects tend to have a limited exclusivity which allows the designer  
to relicense or sell the fonts to others after some period. This can  
subsidise the cost of the initial development. In the case of  
development work for OFLB there is no reason to assume any extra  
income after release, so the initial fee would have to cover everything.

Two concerns: figures differ for everyone. For any figure and time I  
mention, you will be able to find someone who is eager to do it for  
half. But the same is true for dentists and car mechanics. Entirely up  
to you how cheap you want to go. You tend to get what you pay for.

Depending on the benefactors of your fund, you can think of  
alternative ways of raising interest. For instance, develop a project  
with Amazon for a new set of device screenfonts. Share the cost, reach  
some sort of agreement over the rights in the long term. But I'll  
leave the technicalities of such cooperations to you.

Cheerio,
Erik