I agree the average person is likely fine with the fonts on their computer, but this is profoundly misunderstanding the importance of design. Typefaces are incredibly important, and have been for centuries.

I'd argue that complaining about font prices is less like a Hermes bag, and more like complaining about high-end ingredients when a supermarket has cheap stuff. Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer.

Part of the problem is that Monotype has a bit of a monopoly in the upper segment of the market though right? I know they're not the only players, but it feels like they've vacuumed up enough small, successful foundries that they now control enough of the market that they can get away with the kind of aggressive behavior that wouldn't be tenable in a healthier, more competitive marketplace.

From Wikipedia [0]

> Via acquisitions including Linotype GmbH, International Typeface Corporation, Bitstream, FontShop, URW, Hoefler & Co., Fontsmith, Fontworks [ja] and Colophon Foundry, the company has gained the rights to major font families including Helvetica, ITC Franklin Gothic, Optima, ITC Avant Garde, Palatino, FF DIN and Gotham. It also owns MyFonts, used by many independent font design studios.[3] The company is owned by HGGC, a private equity firm.

For those less familiar with them, those are BIG names, and the acquisition of them could perhaps aptly be compared, for instance, to Disney's acquisitions of properties like Lucasfilm and Marvel.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotype_Imaging

Hermes doesn't forbid you from wearing your watch or charge 10x more for you to wear it while playing a mobile game.

I think a lot of the anger is more about the complexity and price discrimination than the absolute price.

I don't know what a Hermès is or connotates, but I think the complaint is as much about the artificial and seemingly arbitrary restrictions as opposed to purely the price.

You can try to create a Veblen good out of a digital artifact and play the all or nothing game, but it's proven very hard to restrict something which can be copied at no cost and with no limitations.

When you buy expensive clothes, it would be silly for the seller to try and license them to be only worn on Mondays, or at dress-code events, or based on your taxable income. People are not going to take your "license" seriously, even if you'd have some legal grounds and might well win a legal argument.

I have a great deal of admiration for artists and designers, and I know that creating a multiple-variant typeface with great applicability that's either historically correct or truly innovative is an art form.

This reminds me of Napster-era debates about artists' rights versus distribution.

The fonts loaded on one machine are typically not loaded reliably on all machines, so you need to distribute fonts with your application. Doing this is probably a violation of the license that all those "free fonts" were distributed under, so your only options are:

1. Public Domain Fonts

2. Fonts that cost money

The set of public domain fonts is pretty small and most of them are low quality - not all, thankfully - and out of the ones that don't suck a lot of them only support the latin character set.

As for fonts that cost money, just to give you one example, I recently asked a foundry what it would cost to license a font for my indie game. Their quote was $1100/yr with a ceiling of 300k copies sold (so I'd need to come back and pay them more on a yearly basis and the cost would go up if I was successful). This was only for 3 variants - regular, italic and medium - and only for the latin character set. For one typeface.

Certainly if I was throwing around millions of dollars I could pay that without blinking, but it's far out of reach for independent developers (and they know I'm independent)

Lots of games distribute "baked fonts", where the ttf/otf is statically rendered into a bunch of texture atlases and they ship the atlases instead of the font. Many font licenses I've seen don't permit this kind of use, so I suspect a lot of games are actually in violation of their font licenses, if they paid to license their fonts at all.

Hell, just the other day I prepared a PowerPoint presentation for work using one of the stock Office fonts and then I opened it in Office on another machine and the font was missing...

I feel like you're arguing against a point GP entirely didn't make. GP is saying there's a market mismatch here - there's money on the table that font makers are ignoring, and simultaneously apps end up using uglier default fonts. Both parties could benefit from meeting in the middle.

Do you consider fonts largely useless, overpriced and primarily directed at customers who seek to display status symbols? Because that's the analogy, I'm not sure I agree.

But the prices are off the charts, and it's the usual private-equity buying up the competition & their IP and then squeezing as much as they can. Not sure why that's worth rooting for.

Well if the same font could be independently discovered, would your view change at all? Of course at high resolutions this is unlikely but I feel like if I made the same image within 5 pixels wide and 9 pixels high and two colors as some font it might be accused of being similar, much like with some accusations in music.

In my experience part of the pain is having some decision-maker or stake-holder getting married to a design during the mockup phase. A lot of the mockup generators will use fonts you'll have to license later for free in the mockup.

There are very few fonts that exist in all the major platforms. But there are excellent free and open source fonts that you can use. I also want to point out that if you make an "app" and publish it on a platform like appstore, you are basically a slave to the platform.

I'd say the same about shows and movies, which is where the supermajority of this conversation is typically focused, especially given how much free content is over YouTube.

I guess you’ve never worked with one of those designers whose friend’s cofounder’s VC’s boyfriend shops at Neeman Marcus. Try telling one of them they have to use a normal legible tried and true font :s

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