Font choices & prices (was Re: [clue-tech] gimp fonts for [printed] graphics)

[Matt Gushee]

Michael J. Hammel wrote:

>>Yes, thanks Matt for the links.  Paying $50 for a good set of fonts is 
>>probably worth it.  I'll check it out.
> 
> 
> Really good fonts are more than that actually, but a decent set of fonts
> for simple brochures can be had for $50.  My wife has paid in the
> hundreds for the fonts she uses on brochures for corporate clients. 

Generally speaking that's quite true. There are a lot of subleties to 
fonts, and how much you should spend depends on a number of factors. I 
don't claim to be a typography expert, but in my somewhat-informed view 
there are two main things to consider in choosing fonts: design and 
technical quality. Now, design is of course a highly subjective thing, 
but it tends to matter more for uses like titles and for publications 
that are supposed to be eye-catching, like magazines and glossy brochures.

When I say technical quality, I mean things like hinting and spacing. 
Spacing is pretty self-explanatory. Hinting is this: if you scale a font 
to different sizes with exactly the same shape, it *looks different*. 
Hints are instructions that modify the shapes of letters to create a 
consistent visual impression at different sizes. As you can imagine, 
hinting is an art rather than a science, and it's bloody hard work, and 
there are very few people who can do it well (BTW, when I said in an 
earlier message that TrueType fonts were harder to get right than Type 
1, I was mainly referring to hinting).

These technical differences tend to be more important for running text, 
and good hinting and spacing really help to make the text readable. You 
can't judge quality in this sense by looking at font samples, and 
ordinary readers don't judge it consciously at all--but it will 
certainly affect their impression of a document, even if they can't 
explain why.

Then there are grey areas. I think there's a general consensus in the 
design world that Times Roman, for example, is way overused. It's dull, 
which sounds like a design matter, but there's a technical aspect to it 
too. Times Roman was designed for a very specific purpose: newspapers. 
Newspapers, of course, are printed at very high speed on low-quality 
paper, and the letter shapes were designed to maximize readability under 
those constraints. It's kind of a least common denominator, and it lacks 
the subtleties of, say, Garamond, which is both readable and (most 
people think) attractive, but which needs better print quality to look 
its best.

Anyway, you usually have to pay a fair amount of money for technically 
good fonts. The major foundries like Adobe, Monotype and so on mostly 
charge around $120-200 for a single font family (e.g a complete set of 
Garamond, including Roman, Bold, Italic, Bold Italic, and perhaps a few 
other variants). But that's not the high end. People who do magazine 
work may get their fonts from places like the Font Bureau, which 
probably charges 2-5 times as much as Adobe, but if I'm not mistaken the 
main thing they're paying extra for is a fresh design.

Now here's the deal with the FontSite 500, and their $50 price (as I 
said, that's extremely cheap for what you get). The fonts are mostly or 
all clones of well-known designs like Garamond, Palatino, Bembo, Gill 
Sans. For some strange reason, font designs are not generally covered by 
any IP protection--I guess they're not copyrightable under US law; maybe 
you could patent them, but it would be too much work for a font. Font 
*names* can be and usually are trademarked. So if you want to sell, say, 
Gill Sans, you have to license the name from the trademark holder. But 
it's perfectly legal to copy Gill Sans and sell it under a different name.

That's the legal story as I understand it (IANAL). Obviously, there's a 
huge ethical issue too. My position on that is that I strongly support 
the right of designers to get paid for their creative work. I don't 
support the right of corporations to profit in perpetuity from other 
people's creative work, especially if they aren't adding value to the 
product. To the best of my knowledge, the designers of the fonts in the 
FontSite 500 collection are all dead, so I don't feel bad about buying it.

OTOH, even if it isn't unethical to buy clones of dead designers, it is 
good to financially support living designers. It's also good to never 
shop at Wal-Mart, and if I could afford to, I *would* never shop at 
Wal-Mart, and I'd buy all my fonts from today's best designers. I just 
ain't got no stinkin' money.

Now, as for the quality issue: I'm pretty sure the FontSite 500 is good 
for a bit more than "simple brochures." I'm working on publishing a 
book, and hoping to use one of the fonts from that collection. So far 
I've mainly been dealing with the content, but I've done a few test 
prints with FontSite Bergamo, a Bembo clone. Is it as good as a more 
expensive, "real" Bembo font? Is it good enough? I'm not sure, and once 
I really get into the typesetting I might find I have to spring for the 
"real" one. But so far, I've found it to be very good.

Like you really wanted to know all this ;-)

--
Matt Gushee
Englewood, CO, USA