Notes on font licensing
In the year of our lord 2024 it feels so very antiquated that there’s separate licenses for web and desktop fonts. Every project I work on requires both font formats and I know there’s business reasons why a type foundry might make those separate purchases but as a designer it’s a deeply frustrating experience to just...use the fonts and make cool things with them.
If a type foundry wants to keep desktop and web fonts as separate purchases instead of bundling them together then they really need to offer easily downloadable trial fonts. In fact, perhaps the main reason that I use so much of David Jonathan Ross’s work is that he has three buttons next to his fonts: Try, Test, Buy.
Won’t trial fonts just open the gates to piracy though? Well, earlier this month Rutherford Craze gave an update on his trial fonts:
This weekend it’ll be one year since we started providing full, non-subset trial fonts. At the time I wasn’t entirely confident it’d work — but with tangible benefits and only hypothetical risks, I had to at least give it a shot. Reader, it has been a resounding success.
It’s good for foundries because it’s good for customers and designers. (I can’t count the number of times I’ve bought a font and realized, with horror, that actually it’s the wrong weight or style for my needs and now I can’t really afford to buy the right one.)
Trial fonts are a balm against anxiety, helping us make decisions as designers, and help us trust the purchase is the right one. And so now whenever I see that a foundry doesn’t offer test fonts, I tend to avoid buying them, just in case.