[HN Gopher] Helvetica Now Variable
___________________________________________________________________
Helvetica Now Variable
Author : bpierre
Score : 242 points
Date : 2021-08-17 15:45 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.monotype.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.monotype.com)
| flixic wrote:
| Really great font. I loved Helvetica, Helvetica Now was a great
| extension, but was just so many files, and this is a great fix to
| the problem. I would have liked slant to be yet another variable
| instead of just two variations, but this is still nice.
|
| And yet, I just can't imagine ever using this in actual design.
| Licensing makes it ridiculous to recommend to almost all clients,
| and there are great, much more affordable alternatives, Inter
| being completely free.
| seumars wrote:
| Helvetica Now is such a departure from what makes the typeface a
| classic that I think Monotype kept Helvetica in the name mostly
| for marketing purposes. To me CommercialType's Neue Haas Grotesk
| is the absolute best digitalization of Miedingers original
| drawings.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Can you elaborate?
|
| I'm comparing the two e.g. on MyFonts:
|
| https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mti/helvetica-now/
|
| https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/linotype/neue-haas-grotesk/
|
| Or specifically for the medium text:
|
| https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mti/helvetica-now/text-medium/
|
| https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/linotype/neue-haas-grotesk/pro...
|
| Aside from the fact that they're scaled slightly differently,
| nothing whatsoever jumps out to me as noticeably different, in
| any weight, except that Neue Haas Grotesk has descenders that
| seem unnaturally short, but I can't tell if that might be a
| rendering box clipping issue.
|
| What makes Helvetica Now "such a departure" and the name
| Helvetica just "marketing"? Whatever difference there is seems
| extremely subtle to my eyes...
| ardit33 wrote:
| They are very different fonts.
|
| I have used them both in apps, and they both have their
| quirks. I excepted Helvetica Now to be slightly
| better/modernized version of traditional helvetica, but it is
| not. It feels different (not better).
|
| Nue Hass Grotesk has its own issues. It has a very industrial
| feel, and make it great for single line of text as a display
| font. It fails if your text is over 2-3 lines (eg. news
| headlines). I think Bloomberg news uses it successfully, as
| it matches its 'industrial/business' feel, but it is not a
| 'warm' font.
|
| The lesson I learned: The perfect font doesn't exist. They
| all have flaws.
| dhosek wrote:
| It's still disconcerting to me to see that monotype.com after the
| Helvetica headline. Monotype and Linotype were fierce rivals
| since their inception in the late 19th century. The cases where a
| typeface was offered for both Monotype and Linotype hot metal
| were rare (Times New Roman and Sabon being the most notable
| cases). It was only in the post-digital era that we saw
| consolidation where Agfa (at that time wholly owned by Bayer, the
| aspirin people) bought the company1 and merged it with their
| prepress division, Agfa Compugraphic. It was later sold to a
| private equity firm who 7 years later bought Linotype, at that
| time owned by German printing company Heidelberg. They've
| continued their acquisitions since then purchasing FontShop, the
| largest indie vendor of typefaces, ITC which was founded as a
| platform-independent supplier of typeface designs and, most
| recently URW, a newer entry in the type world but largely
| influential for high-quality designs (alongside some copied
| designs) and for the creation of Ikarus which was the first
| outline-based type description system, predating even Metafont.2
|
| 1. The late 20th century Monotype was the descendant of the
| English spin-off of the American parent company. Lanston Monotype
| did not survive the transition from hot metal typesetting and was
| never the significant producer of new designs that English
| Monotype was. Last I heard, the remains of American Monotype (aka
| Lanston Monotype) were held by a Canadian printer, although that
| was 20 years ago and he was not a young man so I don't know now).
|
| 2. I had previously thought that Metafont was the first outline-
| based type design system, not realizing Ikarus's priority until
| recently.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| Ah, so I wasn't imagining it. I know little about font history,
| but I know that Arial is a Monotype thing, and Arial is a
| metrically-compatible Helvetica look-alike, so it seemed
| strange that Helvetica would be under the same brand.
| legrande wrote:
| I like new spins on old classics. Always liked Hellvetica:
| https://allbestfonts.com/hellvetica/
| Sharlin wrote:
| It would be even funnier if there were just slight keming
| irregularities, just enough to infuriate those who care about
| such things (oblicatory xkcd: [1])
|
| [1] https://xkcd.com/1015/
| arendtio wrote:
| Just yesterday, I hat a Renault Koleos in front of me and was
| wondering why the name looked so weird and I have the feeling
| that the kerning is just slightly off (e.g. the first O is
| too close to the K):
|
| https://www.netcarshow.com/Renault-Koleos-2020-1600-0b.jpg
| da_chicken wrote:
| /r/keming is still the best named subreddit on the whole
| site.
| todd3834 wrote:
| Am I crazy for expecting fonts to be free? There are so many good
| options that I can use without paying a license fee. I can't
| imagine liking the tiny differences in a font so much that I
| would get myself locked into a yearly licensing fee.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Well, no, it's realistic. I find myself going to Google Fonts
| more and more these days, even for serious brand work. This is
| mostly due to Google and a few other companies sponsoring the
| making of great open fonts.
|
| However, the free market situation is pretty yikes. A few
| giants and a bunch of boutique foundries (check out
| https://klim.co.nz/) still make it work, but the open source
| monetisation problem that we find in software is a lot worse
| when it comes to fonts, because there is no sustainable
| product/service to sell _with_ your free font.
|
| Maybe the age of great font making is coming to a close. After
| what must be hundreds of thousands of great fonts (and so many
| people still just opting for Helvetica), maybe we got all we
| need.
| Santosh83 wrote:
| Paying for products per se is not a problem. What always
| becomes a problem are stuff like unfair pricing, surge pricing,
| extortionate rates and fees backed up by
| monopoly/DRM/regulations, recurring subscriptions or ever
| increasing rates for the same product with no meaningful
| improvement and so on.
|
| Fonts can be sold but pricing calculated per page view and
| device just strikes me as a bit too much. Why not just sell
| them at a flat rate? Unlike software fonts seldom change once
| bought so what is the basis for subscription fees instead of
| one-time sale?
| krapht wrote:
| Why are so many formerly desktop applications sold
| individually per major version now sold as subscription
| services delivered online through the browser?
|
| The answer is the same.
| LegitShady wrote:
| greed and overreach? lack of alternatives? lock in?
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| If you don't like terms don't pay it. They wouldn't do it it
| if it didn't make money. If the terms are not appealing use a
| free font.
| kube-system wrote:
| The price of a Ferrari also seems unreasonable to me. I drive
| a different car. I also use fonts other than Helvetica. I'm
| not entitled to either of them.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Yes, you are crazy and perhaps even entitled to think that you
| deserve the fruit of all font creator's labour for nothing.
| netr0ute wrote:
| Google Fonts disagrees.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| I don't know about expecting them to be FREE. But sometimes I
| have to laugh at the licensing terms I see on some fonts.
|
| I have a weird fascination with fonts. They're pleasing to look
| at, and interesting to compare. But come on. At the end of the
| day, pretty much 95+% of contemporary fonts are trivial little
| tweaks to Garamond, Baskerville, Helvetica, Century, or some
| other font that hasn't been novel for centuries.
|
| What people are paying for are the most subtle of cues, to make
| their text subconsciously distinguishable from the next
| magazine or marketing campaign. For a few years, until the new
| font becomes old-hat or commonplace, and needs to be revamped
| again to keep your brand subconsciously fresh.
|
| Obviously there is commercial value in this, or else people
| wouldn't pay the amounts that they pay for fonts. But I don't
| understand why we lionize font designers the way the we do.
| switz wrote:
| Fonts are a herculean effort and a dazzling display of
| creativity and taste. The fee for a good font is, generally
| speaking, nominal. Use free fonts if you want, but a good font
| is worth paying for.
|
| You are "crazy"[0] for _expecting_ them to be free. But if you
| don 't want to use a paid font, that's totally within your
| prerogative.
|
| [0] though I prefer not to use that word, perhaps a better word
| would be 'entitled'
| bin_bash wrote:
| I'm happy paying people for their effort and creativity. This
| licensing agreement is not something I would personally
| consider though:
|
| > You get a total number of prepaid pageviews that can be
| used over time. This means that you will pre-pay for a number
| of pageviews, then you'll have to come back to order more
| after your site has been viewed that number of times.
|
| > For example, if you order 250,000 page views, when your
| webpages using the webfonts have been viewed 250,000 times,
| you will need to buy the webfont package again for an
| additional number of prepaid pageviews. Pageviews are valid
| for 4 years.
|
| (Then again I mostly do tools and infra so I'm not in this
| market anyways.)
| switz wrote:
| Oh, I'm not defending this license in particular. That's a
| great point, apologies.
|
| Most fonts I see for sale have a one-time license fee for #
| of views/month. So if you do 500k monthly views you pay
| ~$99 once, and 5MM views is X*4. That's pretty reasonable
| to me, the costs are hardly prohibitive.
|
| If you're looking for a fantastic variable font, I can
| recommend Proxima Vara[0], which is the variable iteration
| of Proxima Nova. It follows this licensing structure.
|
| [0] https://proxima-vara.marksimonson.com
| [deleted]
| philjackson wrote:
| > [0] though I prefer not to use that word, perhaps a better
| word would be 'entitled'
|
| Then why not use that word?
| switz wrote:
| I was quoting the OP.
| hbosch wrote:
| Fonts are software. They require design and engineering. Are
| there free, open-source, high quality fonts? Yes, there are.
| And some businesses choose to sell their fonts. It's _their_
| responsibility to make sure discerning users see the
| justification in that.
|
| Just like software, there are often free alternatives that can
| suit your fancy... but sometimes, you have to pay for what you
| really want or need.
| speedgoose wrote:
| I wouldn't pay an expensive yearly fee for a font, but as
| software developers like to get paid, graphic designers do as
| well. Of course you have a lot of graphic designers who do that
| as a hobby or don't want money and share it freely, but graphic
| design is a bit different than open source code because the
| creator doesn't get as much benefits from sharing the work.
| antihero wrote:
| I wonder which is the most fully featured free Helvetica clone?
| mrunseen wrote:
| Check "TeX Gyre Heros". It is featured version of Nimbus Sans
| (aka Helvetica digitised by Bitstream) which were donated to
| X Consortium back then.
| mikedc wrote:
| TeX Gyre Heros[0] is the most faithful (to the original
| Helvetica masters) FOSS reproduction that I'm aware of.
|
| [0] https://ctan.org/pkg/tex-gyre-heros?lang=en
| mrunseen wrote:
| Most foundries offer perpetual licenses though, only foundries
| that offer yearly fee _that I'm aware of_ is Font Bureau and
| Dalton Maag, compared to maybe hundreds of foundries which
| offer non-expiring licenses. I agree there is some quirks with
| license system though.
|
| You're missing a very important point: Designing fonts always
| cost money. The thing with Google Fonts (and/or with other free
| fonts) is the price was paid beforehand by Google (or of
| course, with hobbyists free time).
| otterley wrote:
| Should we reasonably expect the fruit of anyone's labor to be
| free? It's a designer's right to voluntarily give away their
| product, but that doesn't mean it's our right to use just
| anyone's work for free without their permission.
| com2kid wrote:
| > Am I crazy for expecting fonts to be free? There are so many
| good options that I can use without paying a license fee. I
| can't imagine liking the tiny differences in a font so much
| that I would get myself locked into a yearly licensing fee.
|
| Having worked at Microsoft for years, I also got a chance to
| work directly with Monotype on custom fonts for a project's
| specific needs (wearable, tiny screen, specific DPI).
|
| Monotype is _amazing_ to work with. And given the amount of
| work they did, and what we got out of it, the price was
| absurdly reasonable.
|
| For your blog? Use a free font.
|
| But if you _need_ a custom font, you really do need a custom
| font, and Monotype is #1 in the industry for a good reason.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| I never understood under what circumstances you would really
| need a custom font. Could you say more about why that was the
| case?
| com2kid wrote:
| Microsoft Band, curved screen, tiny DPI, and we initially
| were using raster fonts, not true type. 4 bit alpha for
| anti-aliasing.
|
| Primary glyphs were hand hinted, with glyph of each font
| size custom made to fit on our grid.
|
| For v2 we ended up using Monotype's awesome embedded font
| engine that let us have real true type font rendering in
| just kilobytes of RAM with a 96mhz CPU. Insanely cool tech,
| I believe we were the first adopters of it, we helped them
| optimize a fair bit of the underlying engine code, and
| fixed some bugs along the way.
|
| Still a custom font file though. Both the true type and
| raster fonts were variants of Segoe, Microsoft's main UI
| font. We wanted it to be on brand, but also look great on
| our screen.
|
| So tl;dr that is why the MS Band 2 had really good looking
| CJK glyphs and it is how we pulled off anti-aliased fonts
| on a tiny LOL CPU with next to no RAM. :)
| abegnoche wrote:
| Video Games is an example, each AAAA games I worked on had
| custom fonts (that was used in-game but also for our
| powerpoints presentation during the making of the game).
| bskap wrote:
| Likely branding. For example, Coca-cola can write pretty
| much whatever they want on the can and you'd still know it
| was them because of the font.
| flixic wrote:
| Both Netflix[0] and the company I worked at designed custom
| fonts to _save_ money. As other comment threads say, it's a
| standard practice to license by pageviews, and it can be
| difficult to negotiate. Alternative: just have your own
| custom font, exclusive and unlimited license.
|
| [0]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/21/17147170/netflix-
| sans-cus...
| Symbiote wrote:
| A distinctive font can be very recognizable, just like a
| logo, colour pallet and other parts of a house style.
|
| I've recognized fast food places abroad with the logo text
| translated into Arabic or Cyrillic by the font.
| SahAssar wrote:
| I'm just guessing, but based on the description (Microsoft,
| wearable, tiny screen, specific DPI) it sounds like for the
| Microsoft band:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Band
| deltron3030 wrote:
| People start to care when they get deeper into the graphic
| design rabbit hole and basically express their work through
| type and its character exclusively, like in logo design, poster
| design etc. where type character has a big impact on the
| individual letter level.
|
| Body and sub-heading text is a bit more forgiving and less
| detail thirsty, the focus is more on the texture of textblocks
| rather than the individual letter or words.
|
| If you have to cut up and modify individual letters, Helvetica
| can be quite nice to work with.
| SippinLean wrote:
| Yes, the good ones require a lot of hard work by designers and
| producers.
|
| Where else can you find a sans-serif battle-tested over a
| century that's variable, for free?
| II2II wrote:
| I expect some fonts to be free, but I do not expect all fonts
| to be free. The former is because we have become dependent upon
| fonts through the use of technology, and having restrictive
| licenses upon all fonts would inhibit the use of technology.
| The latter is because I have no desire to dictate the terms
| that font creators use.
|
| That being said, I don't have high expectations or great needs
| of fonts since legibility is the most important criteria. Fonts
| are tools to differentiate the structure of a document. In most
| cases, the design of a document is less relevant.
| _huayra_ wrote:
| Can someone explain why pro fonts are so damn expensive?
|
| There are a bazillion free fonts which are great for most uses,
| but for a font like this where it's not as if the font was custom
| calligraphy (e.g. for a video game or something) and is just a
| "good normal font", what exactly goes on to make this font and
| others like it worth the money?
|
| I genuinely don't know if there are special features of this font
| that are beyond what you can get from very similar free fonts or
| if it's just some brand recognition thing.
| klaussilveira wrote:
| Helvetica just gives me warm feelings. For the other type freaks
| lost around here: https://www.hustwit.com/helvetica/
| vmladenov wrote:
| The fact that it's nearly 70 years old and is still an
| influential "modern" font is amazing to me. It just feels
| right.
| jressey wrote:
| "Helvetica(r) Now Variable builds on the groundbreaking work of
| 2019's Helvetica Now release."
|
| I am so far out of touch that I cannot believe this is relevant
| to anyone outside of designers who build their career on
| constantly changing to the newest thing?
| _greim_ wrote:
| Dragging the "optical size" slider to a lower value, I'm
| horrified to see that the cutoff on the lowercase 'e' is no
| longer parallel to the direction of the text. This was always my
| go-to way of differentiating Helvetica from look alikes. Now I
| have to find a new technique :(
| flowerlad wrote:
| Fantastic font, now infinitely malleable! Unfortunately it is
| expensive, and you can't just buy it and use it, you have to
| renew the license annually.
| https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mti/helvetica-now-variable?tab...
|
| And my use case isn't even covered: include in a web application
| that will be downloaded and installed by customers. My current
| choice is OpenSans https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans
| stimpson_j_cat wrote:
| > you can't just buy it and use it, you have to renew the
| license annually
|
| The page you linked to says otherwise ("License: Pay Once"). In
| some cases the license is annual.
|
| > include in a web application that will be downloaded and
| installed by customers
|
| The page you linked to also includes this as a licensing
| option, no? ("App: for embedding in mobile applications")
| jbellis wrote:
| I don't see "pay once" as an option anywhere on that page.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| I thought best-practice for web apps was to use system fonts ?
| e.g. along the lines blogged here[1]
|
| [1] https://booking.design/implementing-system-fonts-on-
| booking-...
| Santosh83 wrote:
| CSSWG is trying to standardise ui-serif, ui-sans-serif, ui-
| monospace and so on. System fonts are a good option if you
| don't mind sacrificing brand identity for performance. But
| fonts are not the main causes of latency and lag in most
| sites these days. The main culprits are tons of ads, tracking
| scripts and images.
| kevincox wrote:
| IMHO if you can convince people that you don't need "brand
| identity" the best font is not choosing a font at all and
| using the browsers default. (Or maybe "sans-serif" because a
| lot of browsers have serif defaults which isn't always the
| best).
| msla wrote:
| > And my use case isn't even covered: include in a web
| application that will be downloaded and installed by customers.
| My current choice is OpenSans
| https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans
|
| My God if you didn't tee this up perfectly:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20090422173924/http://diveintoma...
|
| > FUCK THE FOUNDRIES
|
| > Seriously. Fuck them. They still think they're in the
| business of shuffling little bits of metal around. You want to
| use a super-cool ultra-awesome totally-not-one-of-the-11-web-
| safe-fonts? Pick an open source font and get on with your life.
|
| > I know what you're going to say. I can hear it in my head
| already. It sounds like the voice of the comic book guy from
| The Simpsons. You're going to say, "Typography is by
| professionals, for professionals. Free fonts are worth less
| than you pay for them. They don't have good hinting. They don't
| come in different weights. They don't have anything near
| complete Unicode coverage. They don't, they don't, they
| don't..."
|
| > And you're right. You're absolutely, completely, totally,
| 100% right. "Your Fonts" are professionally designed,
| traditionally licensed, aggressively marketed, and bought by
| professional designers who know a professional typeface when
| they see it. "Our Fonts" are nothing more than toys, and I'm
| the guy showing up at the Philadelphia Orchestra auditions with
| a tin drum and a kazoo. "Ha ha, look at the freetard with his
| little toy fonts, that he wants to put on his little toy web
| page, where they can be seen by 2 billion people ha h... wait,
| what?"
|
| > Let me put it another way. Your Fonts are superior to Our
| Fonts in every conceivable way, except one:
|
| > WE CAN'T FUCKING USE THEM
| vmception wrote:
| The secret ingredient is copyright infringement
| newhotelowner wrote:
| I prefer Source Sans Pro.
|
| https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Source+Sans+Pro
| Noxmiles wrote:
| How does this work? Normally I download and install TTF files
| and install them on my computer. How are licensed fonts work?
| Is there some kind of proprietary installation?
| _greim_ wrote:
| If you (the end user) download and install a font on your
| machine, or buy an OS with it pre-installed, then you (the
| end user) are paying the licensing for it.
|
| If you (the website operator) link to a font from your CSS
| file so end users' browsers will download and render text
| with it, then you (the website operator) are paying the
| licensing fees.
| ctvo wrote:
| If you violate their agreement, and they find it, they sue
| you.
| sodality2 wrote:
| You probably can't use it for any commercial purpose. Locally
| they can't really do much about it.
| kube-system wrote:
| Copyright licensing is entirely a legal construct. Some
| people attempt to make DRM to enforce it, but it's certainly
| not a requirement.
|
| For example, if you visit my webpage, your computer will
| download the copyrighted text from it and save it in your
| cache.
| KitDuncan wrote:
| Look at Inter. Absolutely the best open source font I found.
| Also variable!
| N1H1L wrote:
| Another great option and my current favorite is the Source
| Family from Adobe. They are open source and variable, and
| have a full family of Serif, Sans and Monospace fonts.
|
| https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-serif
|
| https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans
|
| https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-code-pro
| da_chicken wrote:
| > _Unfortunately it is expensive, and you can 't just buy it
| and use it, you have to renew the license annually._
|
| Not even that. If you want it for a web page you have to pay in
| blocks of page views. In my mind that moves it from "eh" to
| "LOL no". These are licensing terms for people who want the
| name.
| stimpson_j_cat wrote:
| That's a standard practice for a lot of webfont vendors isn't
| it? I know it was for Typekit/Adobe Fonts (which requires a
| Creative Cloud subscription).
| da_chicken wrote:
| I'm sure it is standard practice. That still doesn't make
| commercial web font licenses more reasonable for anything
| except advertising and marketing campaigns.
| cosmie wrote:
| It's also incredibly risky for advertising and marketing
| campaigns.
|
| I had one client that started getting their product
| catalog scraped aggressively, and the invoice for their
| licensed font usage that month was an order of magnitude
| higher than they expected (low six figures, vs. low five
| figures).
|
| They slapped the site behind an aggressively configured
| enterprise WAF[1] in response to that bill specifically.
| It made for an abrasive visitor experience, fundamentally
| broke server logging data (due to header mangling), and
| constantly broke third party integrations.
|
| It was such a pain to service the client that I ended up
| convincing their network security team to let me pilot
| Cloudflare in front of the WAF (that they insisted
| remain). Ended up using a Worker function to tidy up
| after the janky WAF header mangling, got them to remove
| the explicit challenge page, and just swapped out the
| licensed font for a generic/free one for suspicious
| activity.
|
| All because of that stupid pageview based font licensing
| model and its susceptibility to abuse.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_application_firewall
| spockz wrote:
| If one is going through those lengths to influence a page
| view counter, couldn't one just report a different
| number?
|
| What did the WAF even do?
| cosmie wrote:
| In the case of the font foundry my client was licensing
| from,
|
| *> You were not allowed to self-host the font files, and
| had to load them directly from the hosting URL provided
| by the font foundry
|
| *> There was no explicit reporting involved. Every time
| the font resource was downloaded from their server, the
| foundry counted that as a licensed pageview.
|
| *> The foundry used cache control headers[1] on the
| response, so that _every_ page load required contacting
| their origin server and could be logged for billing
| purposes.
|
| *> The foundry sent an invoice, telling you what your
| usage was. If your resource download/pageview count was
| within your contractual limit, you're invoiced your base
| rate. If your pageview count was above your contractual
| rate, you pay your base rate + whatever your overage cost
| was.
|
| The WAF did a bunch of stuff, but the primary headache
| was that they enabled challenge pages[2] for every single
| visitor as a knee-jerk reaction, with a ridiculously low
| validity timeframe. So every user got hit with an
| interstitial Javascript challenge page on first pageload,
| and if they stuck around for just a bit they'd get hit
| with another one out of nowhere. And that "other one"
| could easily be on a background resource load rather than
| the primary page itself, which would just hang. And the
| way the interstitial page loaded the final content for
| traffic that "passed the test" obliterated referral
| information and made it impossible to make heads or tails
| of your traffic data.
|
| The intent being that automated traffic wouldn't get past
| the WAF and would never load the actual destination page,
| and by extension the precious font files. But the way it
| operated had a lot of nasty side effects that caused a
| never-ending stream of technical problems, in addition to
| just being a terrible user experience.
|
| [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...
|
| [2] https://www.imperva.com/blog/how-incapsula-client-
| classifica...
| oefrha wrote:
| What even is Typekit's pricing these days? I looked into it
| a few weeks ago and the only thing I could find was Typekit
| comes with any Creative Cloud subscription, including
| $10/mo ones. But surely you can't pay $10/mo to serve an
| arbitrary amount from their webfont CDN? Did I miss
| something? Is the pricing only available after you
| subscribe?
| lstamour wrote:
| Since the 2018 rebranding to Adobe Fonts, there are no
| pageview or font limits for subscribers:
| https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/plan-limits.html
|
| Agency clients need their own subscription, legally:
| https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-
| licensing.html#web-...
| zippergz wrote:
| I have Typekit via Creative Cloud, use web fonts on my
| site, and have not run into any additional fees or
| restrictions. That said, my site is pretty low-traffic,
| so it's possible there's some issue I'd run into if I
| used it more.
| paulddraper wrote:
| As far as I know, that is the deal.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| That's ridiculous..
| [deleted]
| alexwennerberg wrote:
| Typefaces should not be copyrightable. Print ones are not, it
| makes no sense that digital ones are.
| mdip wrote:
| > Fonts should not be copyrightable. Print fonts are not,
| it makes no sense that digital ones are.
|
| I agree with your first statement, except that I'm stuck
| re-wording it to "I wish fonts weren't copyrightable"
| because I can't find an argument/proper analogy that works.
|
| I don't know the details around copyright law, IANAL
| (surprise!) either, so I'm looking at this from an
| incredibly naive legal perspective -- that almost
| everything is copyrightable (in the United States) except
| for facts. Since copyright law predates digital fonts, you
| have to look at things they are most like to see what
| applies (and find a judge to agree, but that part seems to
| be the simple). Print fonts are not copyrightable. I'm not
| sure _why_ they 're not copyrightable -- were they
| explicitly excluded (i.e. there's a law on the books that
| says "Print fonts are not copyrightable"[0]) or were they
| found to be "like this other thing that is excluded, so
| they are excluded, too".
|
| Then, looking at what's similar about print fonts versus
| digital ones, there's not really a whole lot other than
| that they're "concepts" that represent letters in this
| context. One is chiseled out of some form of metal or
| strong material, is that size/shape permanently and though
| there's science/research behind it, for whatever reason, it
| didn't represent enough of a kind of work to warrant
| protection. A font has a lot in common on the surface, but
| underneath it's a program[1]. One could extend that to say
| "bitmap fonts are so similar to print fonts that they
| should be excluded" but one cannot say the same for
| TTF/others and I'd imagine.
|
| The bigger problem, though, is that exclusions to copyright
| are basically never made any longer. This used to be more
| common, but the entertainment industry's money/power
| continues to extend copyright in ways that benefit them to
| the exclusion of other industries -- particularly software
| -- the large players have a lot of money, so a law that was
| designed to equally protect invention/creation (really,
| patent law was by-and-large aimed at helping individual
| inventors protect their invention/give them a chance to
| capitalize it against abusive larger competition) ends up
| helping secure the existing players positions.
|
| Now, I don't know if anyone _wants_ Warner Brothers to make
| Mickey Mouse cartoons, but I suspect there 's a less heavy-
| handed approach to protecting long-held IP while not
| extending copyright, basically, indefinitely for
| everything.
|
| So yeah, all of that to say "No, I don't think fonts should
| be copyrightable, either ... but I can say that for so many
| things and there's so much wrong with Copyright these days
| that it warrants revisiting a reset/rethink." Maybe one
| day!
|
| [0] It won't be that sentence, it'll be a page worth of
| explaining why it doesn't fall into the various defined
| kinds of works.
|
| [1] TTF hinting is turing complete.
| kens wrote:
| To answer your specific question as to why fonts are not
| copyrightable in the US, 37 C.F.R. SS 202.1(e) specifies
| that a "typeface as typeface" is not copyrightable.
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/37/202.1
| amelius wrote:
| From: https://glarts.org/font-and-typeface-legal-tip-sheet/
|
| > In the United States, fonts are protectable under
| copyright law. Typefaces, however, are not. ... A trademark
| protects what a typeface is called, a copyright protects
| how a font program is written, and a design patent protects
| letter design--how the letters appear.
|
| So if I understand this correctly, then unless they have a
| design patent for the entire range of typefaces, you could
| use some of the typefaces if you use a different encoding.
| Perhaps someone with legal background can comment.
| mikedc wrote:
| In the US, "typefaces", ie. the shapes of the letters,
| generally are not. "Fonts", ie. the programs that draw the
| letters, are copyrighted as software, as something of a
| workaround. For more reading on the history here
| Typographica has a succinct overview[0].
|
| [0] https://typographica.org/on-typography/copyright-
| protection-...
| tomrod wrote:
| Point stands. These ought to not be royalty driven.
| mikedc wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow. Whether or not the typeface is
| eligible for copyright, the pricing model and terms of
| use are at the discretion of the font creator.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| "How a font is sold is up to the discretion of the font
| creator" and "a font should not be sold on a sliding cost
| scale" aren't mutually exclusive -- the latter's pretty
| clearly asserting an opinion about reasonable pricing
| models and terms of use. There are a lot of things people
| do that they're perfectly within their rights to do that
| someone else might strongly believe they shouldn't,
| right?
|
| Personally, I don't like the idea of selling fonts with
| costs governed by web page impressions, either, no matter
| how common it may be in the industry. I genuinely like
| having what I consider to be nice typefaces for my web
| sites, but this kind of licensing makes it incredibly
| impractical for me to use most commercial options.
| mikedc wrote:
| Of course, but the "point" in question is whether a
| typeface (or font) should be copyrightable.
| alberth wrote:
| Silly question, so how do type foundries prevent someone
| from literally copying the TTF, WOFF, EOT files - and
| then rebrand a font as their own?
|
| Will the bits/bytes of a TTF be different if two people
| produced identically the exact same shape of the letters?
|
| EDIT: let me clarify a bit. The GP said that the shape of
| the letters is not copyrighted in the US. Which implies
| to me that if Helvetica has the exact shape of the letter
| "s" to be like so, and if I were to manually trace the
| exact same shape (curves, width, height of the letter,
| etc) that I can do that and resell it (or open source it)
|
| What I'm asking is, what prevents someone from skipping
| the step all together of tracing every letter in the
| Helvetica alphabet and instead, just digitally copies the
| TTF font file?
|
| Would the TTF font file I create from a manual tracing of
| the Helvetica alphabet be different than if I simply
| digitally copied the official Helvetica TTF file?
| smitop wrote:
| If you trace each letter of a font to create a new font,
| you are creating a new font "program", even if your new
| "program" is very similar to what you would get from just
| copying the file. The traced font would have a different
| colour than the copied font.
| (https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23)
| Santosh83 wrote:
| Licenses are generally sold to medium sized to large
| companies who would not risk legal action pursuing what
| you suggest. There is money to spread around anyway.
| Fonts and branding are nothing compared to the upkeep for
| C-level execs.
| kube-system wrote:
| The same way any company prevents you from copying any
| computer program and rebranding it as your own. Lawyers.
| Vector fonts count as computer programs.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > What I'm asking is, what prevents someone from skipping
| the step all together of tracing every letter in the
| Helvetica alphabet and instead, just digitally copies the
| TTF font file?
|
| What stops you from copying any copyright-protected
| software? Technically, usually, very little (sometimes
| DRM). But, mostly, its social/economic constraints like
| your (or your business') particular tolerance for legal
| exposure.
| mikedc wrote:
| Users agree to a EULA which stipulates how they can and
| can't use the font. This contract provides the legal
| basis on which a foundry would pursue someone for
| suspected misuse. Here's Monotype's EULA for Helvetica
| Now[0], Section 9 specifically addresses copies and
| derivative works. From there, it becomes a legal matter.
|
| [0] https://www.fonts.com/font/monotype/helvetica-
| now/licenses#
| alberth wrote:
| But how can you differentiate a Helvetica created font
| file from a font file where I manually traced every
| Helvetica alphabet identically.
| [deleted]
| addaon wrote:
| Font cloning is a thing.
|
| Font tracing is usually done by printing out the
| character to be traced at very large scale -- I've seen
| about 12" x 12" -- and placing it directly on a large
| digitizing tablet. A sequence of strokes / points is
| collected for the outline of the character, and then
| curves of somewhat reduced degree are fit to those
| strokes / points to both reduce font data size and reduce
| the impact of errors, inaccuracies, and quantization in
| the data capture.
|
| Even at this huge scale, and with this amount of effort,
| the outline of your character will be very close to --
| visually identical to! -- the starting character, but not
| exact. As a result, the generated font program will be
| quite different. For example, it may use a different
| number of control points for equivalent curves.
|
| Now, one can imagine automating this process differently:
| Take a font file, digitally render each character,
| perturb it a small amount, and resynthesize the strokes
| to generate a new, different program for a visually
| identical font. This is generally against the terms of
| service for the initial font, however, which would make
| it a legal matter...
| franga2000 wrote:
| > This is generally against the terms of service for the
| initial font, however, which would make it a legal
| matter...
|
| I doubt there's anything in the ToS for most fonts
| prohibiting me from rendering a short story that just so
| happens to contain every character and post it online for
| everyone to enjoy. I couldn't possibly predict that my
| friend who doesn't even know the name of the font, let
| alone ever agreed to any ToS, would take that render and
| trace all the characters on it.
|
| Note that I generically said "render", not image or
| raster, since from my understanding, an SVG or vector PDF
| render of the font (not embedded, but turned into paths)
| wouldn't be any more copyrightable than a raster, but far
| easier to clone.
| galago wrote:
| A font isn't just the letterforms, there's also all the
| metrics, spacing, kerning, and OpenType features like
| ligature replacement. Also modern OpenType releases
| contain many languages which makes the metrics even more
| complex. Metrics are also very refined to the point that
| with some fonts if they weren't copied completely there
| would be problems.
| jjeaff wrote:
| I suppose if you manually traced Helvetica letters, then
| they might have a case for misusing their font. After
| all, there isn't a licensing option that allows you to
| use the font as a template.
| amelius wrote:
| But what if the tracing was done by a consumer who
| visited a website containing the Helvetica(tm) font?
| xsmasher wrote:
| If you copied the .ttf file and sold it, it's a copyright
| violation just like any software copying. The foundry
| takes you to court.
|
| If you copy by hand (at what size? at what accuracy? do
| you include the same hinting and ligatures?) the file
| will not be bit-for-bit identical. The foundry cannot
| sue.
| dhosek wrote:
| That type designs are not protected is a gross injustice.
| The time and effort involved in creating a type design is
| significant. Alas, when the type industry had the resources
| to lobby to have copyright law changed, they were making a
| lot of money from stealing each others' designs and chose
| to lobby the opposite. There was an ill-fated effort in the
| 90s to lobby for typeface design protection (I was part of
| it as the editor of a typography magazine) but it never
| achieved any measurable success.
| [deleted]
| croes wrote:
| Print fonts are copyrightable.
| flowerlad wrote:
| In the United States, the shapes of typefaces are not
| eligible for copyright.
|
| See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_
| protecti...
| da_chicken wrote:
| Ah, so that's how knock-off fonts work. You can reproduce
| essentially the same output (the typeface) as long as the
| code that produces it is distinct (the font).
| croes wrote:
| But in France and Germany but not Austria despite the
| Vienna Agreement for the Protection of Type Faces and
| their International Deposit.
|
| http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/dfat/seldoc/1973/2203.
| htm...
| pkaye wrote:
| The digital one is considered as code. In some countries
| even the print one has copyright.
| xwdv wrote:
| Shouldn't bother using custom fonts on web pages anyway, use
| the standard web fonts and save custom fonts for print or
| graphic designs.
| hda111 wrote:
| So I need to develop a view counter for my static website?
| Not sure how to do that. Why do I need to pay for search
| engines crawling my website?
| rebuilder wrote:
| First impression: wow, they aced the execution on this
| advertising. Just the right level of cheeky.
|
| 2nd impression: Did they intentionally put the white monotype
| logo on a mainly white animated header so it kind of disfigures
| the font shown therein? Surely that can't be a mistake!
| amvp wrote:
| The extreme values for "Optical Size" really alter the character
| of the font for me. Changing the angle of the lower arc of the
| "e" for example really alter how the font feels, and it's
| unrecognisable to me as Helvetica:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/vtQZc9I
| 1-6 wrote:
| This is a nightmare for those who are indecisive.
| boulos wrote:
| If you're interested in variable fonts, the recent SF Design Week
| talk [1] from the folks at Google was pretty accessible! Maybe if
| enough folks ping them they'd be willing to put up a recording.
|
| [1] https://sfdesignweek.org/events/typography-in-the-
| variable-a...
| bigtasty wrote:
| Looks like replays and on-demand are available for $15 [1].
| What were your favorite presentations from SF Design Week? I
| did not attend but I would purchase on-demand for $15 if there
| were a few interesting talks.
|
| [1] https://www.boomset.com/apps/eventpage/113863
| boulos wrote:
| I didn't realize it's all still accessible! The event list
| [1] includes abstracts. For me, personally, I was more
| interested in the conversations (e.g., [2]) than the various
| software companies talking about design.
|
| I'd say if you're interested, treat it as a $15 "watch a few
| talks instead of going to a movie".
|
| [1] https://sfdesignweek.org/category/?s&events
|
| [2] https://sfdesignweek.org/events/cocktails-with-top-
| designers...
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I hope Knuth is smiling that Metafont-style procedural fonts are
| winning in the end after decades of haters :D.
| jstx1 wrote:
| Do you genuinely notice differences between fonts? I have a
| general sense of monospaced vs proportional and serif vs sans-
| serif. Past that it's mostly all the same to me and I'm kind of
| impressed that people pay so much attention to the tiny details
| (and maybe questioning whether they really do or whether fonts
| are kind of like wine tasting).
| liminal wrote:
| Yes! Fonts make a huge difference in the impression a piece of
| text will make. Just consider that italics and bold have been
| necessary features of word processors since pretty much the
| beginning. For an even more subtle example, Twitter's new font
| is a very plain sans serif, but people are complaining of
| headaches from reading it:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156094
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| I don't _recognize_ fonts by name, but I certainly notice
| differences between fonts all the time. Too thin, too bold, too
| much space between characters, too italic, more or less impact,
| how difficult it is for me to read a passage with a given font.
| kroltan wrote:
| I don't think "you" as in "the general user base" notices the
| _differences_ between fonts, but there certainly is some innate
| sense of fitness to a design. Similar to how people can tell
| something is cohesive or jankily designed, even if they can 't
| pinpoint what causes the jank.
|
| Personally, I can't recognize specific fonts in the wild
| (especially Helvetica and its infinite lookalikes), but can
| certainly feel when a site uses an inappropriate font (usually
| too thin, but also things like using a UI font for longer-form
| text), to the extent I have a few userscripts that change some
| popular site's fonts to something more appropriate in my
| optinion.
| young_unixer wrote:
| I can only recognize the most common ones: Arial, Helvetica,
| Times New Roman, Calibri, Ubuntu, Comic Sans, Roboto, Computer
| Modern.
|
| But more than noticing the differences between them, what's
| important is noticing when there's something wrong in a
| composition because of the font.
|
| For example, if you show a UI that uses a serif font to
| someone, they'll notice there's something wrong with it, but
| most people probably won't tell you exactly what it is.
| Pentamerous wrote:
| They do. As fast as I can look at a picture of a cat or a dog
| and tell you which of those animals it is, when my husband sees
| a font he immediatly knows which font it is. I find it
| fascinating. He is also my go to person when I choose fonts
| because he always give critiques I would never think of.
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| There is an awesome useful addon if you like hunting down
| fonts that you came across the sites that uses them. It is
| called "WhatFont" for Firefox and Chromium browsers. Click
| the button and then click the font, it will reveal every
| detail of that font.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| I absolutely do. I'm not sure why, it's not something I
| specifically pay attention to, but I definitely appreciate text
| in some fonts more than others. For example, I really liked The
| Economist's print font (and I don't mind the redesign [1])
|
| That said, I once spent a couple weeks trying out various
| programming fonts/sizes, so maybe I'm an outlier. (I'm on Mac
| now, and the system Monaco font is fine. I don't remember what
| I had settled on when I was using Linux until 6 years ago)
|
| I have to add that I recently upgraded from a 2k 27" monitor to
| a 4k one, and the first thing I noticed is how much _nicer_ all
| the text is (again, macOS)
|
| [1] https://designmodo.com/the-economist-redesign/
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| That said, programming fonts are a particular niche of
| interest, because first you want your ambiguous glyphs to be
| easily distinguishable. O vs 0 vs o, l vs I vs 1 vs i, and
| secondly you want the overall feel to be pleasing to you.
|
| Other considerations are how does the font render g (is there
| a loop at the bottom, or just a tail) or a (does it have a
| "tail" at the top or is more like an o with an extra leg?).
|
| People can get really worked up about these details, just
| like a coding style guide: if it differs from what you're
| expecting, it's distracting, but you get used to it after a
| few days/weeks.
|
| Since last I went on this journey, I see that this wonderful
| website for comparing programming fonts popped up:
|
| https://www.programmingfonts.org
| compi wrote:
| Web fonts are so weird, to display this site I had to download
| the advertised font as a .WOFF file to my computer. I now have a
| fully featured copy of what they are selling.
|
| I know they are actually selling the license to use it but still
| it seems weird that any site that licenses and uses this will
| also be mass distributing it to peoples machines.
| lights0123 wrote:
| It's the same concept as Windows. You can (as in physically,
| not as in "it's allowed") download and use it without a
| license, and no one will care if it's just you personally, but
| expect lawyers if you're a big company.
| huashu wrote:
| really amazing work by the monotype team. As always, font
| licensing is a very tricky business, so I understand everyone's
| frustration here.
|
| If any of you are looking for an open-sourced sans serifs for
| your sass and other projects, I covered a couple in my
| newsletter. I go over how to use them with examples and use
| cases. some are variable:
|
| https://fonts.substack.com/p/dosis
| https://fonts.substack.com/p/fow-no4-libre-franklin-a-versat...
| oliwarner wrote:
| Only a psychopath puts font altering controls after the text it
| alters. Nearly unusable on mobile in paragraph mode because it's
| moving all over the place.
|
| Nice font but, as ever, shame about the licensing.
| [deleted]
| DataCrayon wrote:
| Nice!
|
| However, I prefer IBM Plex[1], and it has the advantage of being
| an open-source project!
|
| I have recently re-designed my CV (15 pages down to 2) and used
| IBM Plex for all of it... happy so far.
|
| [1] https://github.com/IBM/plex
| perardi wrote:
| Well by gosh, I am old enough to remember Adobe Multiple
| Masters...
|
| https://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/30/the-adobe-originals-silv...
|
| ...a technology which went absolutely nowhere.
|
| Makes me glad to see Helvetica is now available as variable, as
| well as a non-trivial number of open-source fonts.
|
| https://fonts.google.com/?vfonly=true&sort=popularity
|
| _(Still waiting for Roboto, though. Slab and mono are there, the
| main sans isn't yet, which is too bad.)_
| 1-6 wrote:
| That was a very cool website. I didn't know that fonts alone
| could be used to advertise itself.
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