Dreams of the cheaper font

Fonts. Typeset. Typography.
In the last few weeks I was working on a new layout and design for the main page of my site so every part will look similar.

When I finally showed the head logo of the main page (heszroland.hu) to a friend he instantly critized the font set I used – distance beetwen letter, kernelling, and so on – and offered his help to play around with it. Naturally I accepted the offer and he returned me a better version, explaining what he did and what font-set he used.

I was very glad, but there was a few things I wanted to try/change, so I went to get the font set – Minion Pro. It turns out that you can get it from Adobe for 199.00 USD. Needless to say I did not buy it – it was cheaper to make the changes and send it back to my friend so he can do it with the right fonts.

But this prompted a longer discussion in the evening about the fonts, the prevalence of the Arial and other not-so nice looking default fonts, the price of the custom fonts, their general usability and so on.

The current situation is that you can set any kind of fonts for the texts of your website, but what will be displayed depends on the system of the people who see you website.

For example, if I buy the Minion Pro font set, and set it as the font used on my page you will see Arial most likely, unless you bought the font set too, and installed it on your computer.

As people don’t buy font sets, it is basically irrelevant what custom fonts you use for your site. This means, that not many people buy these font sets so the price is high.

What we would really need is – went my argument – is some kind of read only font types, which would be free, widely and frequently distributed and easily available. These read only font sets would be good only for displaying the fonts but not usable to edit and create new things – yes, probably in about 3 days there would be a method to “break” the read only property, but then you can download the font sets even today, so it’s not a problem.

That would mean that if I want to use some exotic font set for my website I could be pretty sure that the people who come to my site will see those exact letters. It would be an incentive for me to use these fonts. It would mean that a lot of people who are building quality websites would get these fonts because that would not be a useless effort.

And accidentally that would mean that instead of the current X professional designer lets say 100x people would buy the font – I think the 100x is not an over-, rather an underestimation, thus the price of the custom font could be much lower – which means te price of the font sets could be lowered.
When I go to Adobe, I see they sell font sets for an average of 35USD / type (35USD for bold capital, 35USD for italic regular, etc.).
The Chaparral font set has 8 types which cost 35USD apiece, 199USD for the whole set, the same for the Minion Pro.
If displaying custom fonts on web pages would be really easy and effective, and the interest in getting these fonts grown as a result, these could cost 1USD per type, or 5USD for a pack. Would you shell out 5 dollars to get a quality font for your website knowing that everyone can see the exact same fonts you put there?
I think a lot of people would.

Now, I am not 100% sure that this is the way with every font. But since the web content is growing, almost everyone and their dog is writing a blog, create a website, and I think a lot of people want a site that looks good, different, personal, etc., I think there is a growing market for everything that is needed for a good webdesign. Including custom fonts.
We had a pretty good discussion there, and agreed that it could be like that – if only there was the neccessary technology.

As life has it sometimes, next day ZenElements shared his new post on Plurk. I checked it out, and what a coincidence, the post is presenting the CSS3 technique: font embedding – btw, Alex has a whole series of pretty good posts on the CSS3 standard and their use. Check them out.
What it is about: basically with the use of the @font-face command you force the browser to use the font set that can be found on the hosting server. That means that I can use whatever font I want on my page, all I have to do is put the font file into the correct directory on your server and the browser will load it from there.

There are still a few problems with the solution:

Awfully slow.
So far only Safari supports the CSS3 standards, so it does not work with any other browsers yet.
There is no way – as far as I know – to check first if the user has the font on his PC to avoid the download if the answer is yes.

This is a way to achieve the “read only” font set. If the speed can be boosted somehow then it will be a really handy thing. Now the question is, whether it will prompt people to use more custom fonts, and the font sellers to lower their prices to attract more buyers.

I am not sure. But I hope it will happen – mainly because I don’t want to shell out 1,024.00 USD for a font set I will use occasionally.
A note for the end: this post does not want to appear comprehensive, and technical and all. Just some thoughts about a problem we ran into last week, and the resulting discussion, brainstorming.

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