alt Hacker NewsI'm into typography and I like trying out new fonts, but what's with the sudden flood of everyone making their own lately? I remember how novel and interesting it was a few years ago when, like, JetBrains Mono came out. Now it's like every code-adjacent company has their own. Is AI particularly good at font design or something?
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As someone else mentioned, it's almost certainly licensing costs. Monotype bought up all the classic foundries, and their licensing gets very expensive, very quick. You could literally hire a top-tier type designer as a permanent full-time hire to work on your in-house fonts part time and then do whatever they want with the other 99.9% of their time and it would still be cheaper than what Monotype wants.
Im not personally a fan of Geist, but its been around for years and it has been the default for create-next-app for a few years…
Previously it was every company that made a device, before that any company with a text-heavy app like a Word Processor. I think if you stare at fonts long enough and have a design team you eventually make your own.
A good part of it is simply license costs and obligations makes it attractive for certain kinds and sizes of businesses. But there are plenty good open source fonts now that could be used as a basis so that's not all of it.
The other is that people with an eye for design like fonts the way mushrooms like decaying wood. If you leave a designer unattended for too long fonts appear as if from nowhere.