Type designers love seeing their work being used out there in the world. But Peter points out the drawback of this love: Oftentimes when he sees one of his typefaces in projects of other designers, he asks himself: “Did this person actually pay for it?” Piracy is a big problem that was amplified by digital possibilities, and it is necessary to find a licensing solution that fits the modern times and workflows.

Similarities between the type and music industry

There are lots of parallels between the type and the music industry. Back in the days, when Gutenberg printed the first bibles, type was not sold as a product: It was too complex in its production and usage; it was simply not accessible for everyone. This changed later-on, when typefaces were sold on floppy discs and CDs — type became a product, anyone could use it, share it, and, of course, steal it more easily.

Peter Bil’ak about the history of font licensing © Gerhard Kassner (Monotype)

When music was sold as a product, for example via CD or later on iTunes, the value of the product was quite high. In 2013 though, already 68 percent of America’s population consumed music via a streaming service. At the same time, four out of five Spotify users listen to music for free — supported by advertisement. Through this, the value of music is very low. And even though streaming services try to ensure that artists earn money, numbers proof them wrong. For artists, their work just doesn’t pay off through streamed music.

Flatrate pricing of goods like music is simply not a sustainable way, and artists started to respond to this: Services like Tidal (initiated by musicians such as Beyoncé, Madonna and Jay Z) or Soundhalo have slightly different payment models than Spotify and are trying to focus more on the artists’ compensation.

Type as a service versus type as a product

With typefaces, a similar thing happened: What started as a service and then turned into a product (very well produced typefaces have a very high price, and therefore are very vulnerable to piracy), became a service again. Libraries like TypeKit offer access to fonts for a fixed price, which makes them accessible, but at the same time reduces the value of the product.

Type designers have the power to change things!

This leads us back to type design and it’s distribution. Recently, more and more tools (for example the font software Glyphs or Robofont) in the industry were created by actual type designers. Also, changes to our infrastructure are being made right out of the community’s rows (such as the human-readable font format UFO which allows to make your font files more accessible throughout software). Type designers have a real impact on the state of technology, and how their work is made visible to users.

Peter Bil’ak © Gerhard Kassner (Monotype)

Right now, it’s quite clear what needs to be changed: Font piracy is a real problem. Peter shows a headline of a blog article he recently found: “Font company can’t come up with good business model; punishes customers with high prices“. He quotes Steve Jobs, who pointed out that if you really want to compete with piracy, you have to offer a better product. And that’s the point where Peter Bil’ak seems to become really exited about the next part of his presentation: He introduces a product that he has been working on for the last two years: Fontstand.

Introducing Fontstand for Mac

Fontstand is a Mac app that let’s you test fonts in your Mac apps. You can rent fonts for a very small monthly fee (even for free for one hour!), and find the best font for your project, in an easy and legal way. Right now, there are 21 top-level font foundries such as Bold Monday, House Industries, Commercial Type and Suitcase Type Foundry (just to name a few), and more are to come.

It seems like there is hope for the future of font licensing

New ideas from people in the industry and new technological possibilities are helping to push things forward. “After finding a way of making fonts accessible and affordable to other people, I can finally go back to drawing”, says Peter Bil’ak at the end of his talk, and leaves us with an optimistic prospect to the future.

Peter Biľak

Type Designer, Designer (The Hague)

Peter Biľak works in the field of editorial, graphic, and type design and teaches at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. He is running Typotheque, the first foundry to bring webfonts to the market. Recently he started »Works That Work«, magazine of unexpected creativity that rethinks publishing practices. Photo: Mano Strauch

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Go ahead and download Fontstand for free.

AB