[OpenFontLibrary] [GFD] Eye Magazine on the Ubuntu libre fonts

[vernon adams]

Thomas,

But surely the big chunk of proprietary font development is also carried out by 'less experienced designers', and/or designers that 'are young and don't have a family to support', and/or 'live in countries with significantly lower income expectations than the usa'. ?  Those qualitities seem symptomatic of the majority of font designers, irrelevant of what licensing model they publish their fonts under. It's a small minority of font designers that are 'well paid' .

Exactly the same problems exists with raising funds too; only the big companies have proper money to spend on fully funded font development; independent foundries and individuals do not. The boon in 'open source' and free fonts is simply another sign of designers sidetepping the old 'ye must go cap in hand to the big companies', and instead finding new economies and new ways of paying the bills by designing fonts.

-v



On Sep 3, 2012, at 2:41 PM, Thomas Phinney <thomas.phinney at gmail.com> wrote:

> The harder problem to solve is one of funding. When a big company is willing to pay something resembling market rates for a commissioned font, people are happy to make one, and many or most type designers won't mind if the resulting font is made open source.
> 
> But more often than not, there isn't a situation like that. So far Kickstarter and Google Web Fonts have not generally been paying that kind of money.
> 
> Result? Outside of those few high end commissions, people making open source fonts tend to have one or often multiple of the following characteristics:
> - are less experienced type designers; 
> - have some special love for the open source model;
> - are young and don't have to support a family;
> - live in countries with significantly lower income expectations than the USA.

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