

Adobe Acquires Web Typography Innovator Typekit - timf
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/adobe-acquires-web-typography-innovator-typekit-2011-10-03

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cowboyhero
Congrats to Mr Veen et al, but ... Ugh. Typekit was a great service.

I have little faith that Adobe won't completely screw it up.

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tptacek
Count me among the (presumably few) HN'ers that think this is going to be a
win for web typography. The "cool kids" know who Typekit is, but the
mainstream trusts Adobe (look how much crappy Flash there is out there solving
problems that Typekit solves elegantly).

And whatever you may think of Adobe- the- company, it seems to me they've been
an impeccable steward of digital typography. They clearly care about it more
than any other major software vendor.

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aaronblohowiak
I think Adobe has a better chance of getting the mainstream foundries aboard.
If you think the music industry has been resisting modernisation, the type
foundries are practically Amish.

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tptacek
I can't blame them even a little bit. High-quality typefaces are
extraordinarily difficult to design, trivial to misappropriate (I've done it
accidentally several times), virtually impossible to track, and depend totally
on a business model that charges big companies huge amounts of money for para-
exclusive access to those faces (in part to allow those companies to use them
as signaling mechanisms for their brands).

Nerds will never, ever get it through their heads that typefaces aren't cheap.
They're expensive. That's a problem for nerds, because bits are very very
cheap, and naturally anything that can be represented in bits and put on a web
page should be cheap-as-free. It also doesn't help that most nerds can't
appreciate the difference between what's on Google Fonts and what's in
Typekit's portfolio, which only reinforces the notion that fonts should be
cheap... after all, good fonts appear to be free! Silly designers!

But! But! But! I anticipate the multi-paragraph responses from HN's vast army
of copyfighters and respond only with "well that's why we get to choose
between Adobe's service and the crappy fonts on Google Fonts, and Trebuchet
and Arial". Thanks, copyfighters!

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Silhouette
The thing is, if it was as simple as you make out, iTunes would never have
worked, no-one would be running massively profitable stock photo sites, etc.

High quality fonts _are_ difficult to make, but I suspect enough people who
know enough to take advantage of those good fonts appreciate that and would be
willing to pay for them in return. (I have put plenty of my own money where my
mouth is on this point.) As a consequence those who use premium fonts well
would wind up with better looking sites, and the foundries would wind up with
more money.

If those foundries paid attention to other markets, everything from software
to music, they could surely find a far more lucrative business model than the
mess they've created now where everything is available but most of us can't
buy it for most projects. But first they have to get the basic fact that most
creative industries have realised by now: in the age of the Internet, when
copying is free, the market will not accept your masterpiece at its
traditional price, but a lot more people might buy it for a lot less money due
to some combination of convenience and sense of fairness.

Funnily enough, services like Typekit almost seem to be aiming for that model,
except that they've kind of got the worst of both worlds: prices so cheap for
the average small/non-commercial site that they aren't really worth much in
aggregate, but legal terms that mean they can't be used for a large proportion
of otherwise potentially lucrative commercial sites.

~~~
tptacek
Digital distribution of music has been catastrophic for music labels. The
foundries are doing OK today. Why would they embrace a new model?

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Silhouette
I don't think it's fair to compare record labels and font foundries. The
labels are basically glorified middlemen, and they're middlemen who had been
overtly price gouging for many years before the Internet came along. The
foundries typically are the original sources of new fonts and do actually pay
real money to the staff who work on them.

Even then, I think you're overstating the case for the music labels.

> Digital distribution of music has been catastrophic for music labels.

They bitch a lot, but Big Media still seems to make an awful lot of money,
despite obvious competition in the Internet age from both less than legal
alternative channels for the music and from other ways people can spend their
leisure time and money.

Considering the amount of rip-off pricing that was going on prior to the
Internet age, the fact that the Big Four still make as much as they do today
is remarkable. And that's on top of Apple, Amazon et al making a fortune off
it as well, which obviously cuts into the profits of the record labels
themselves, and on top of all the other smaller players like Spotify who are
redistributing music via different channels.

Digital distribution has been catastrophic for bricks 'n' mortar music stores,
but that's about the only group that has lost out disastrously AFAICS. The
rest is just a bunch of middlemen who don't create anything themselves finding
that their services aren't as valuable as they used to be.

> The foundries are doing OK today. Why would they embrace a new model?

Because otherwise competition from cheap/free fonts and the illegal black
market in pro fonts _could_ seriously hurt them. Unlike Big Media, most/all of
them are far too small to actively hunt down sites using their work illegally
and take the necessary action to get some money out of enough of those sites
to survive.

Or if you prefer a more constructive view, because they could make $#!%loads
of money selling web fonts, probably at far higher prices than they are making
for the equivalent usage via services like Typekit, if they stopped worrying
about the people who are going to rip them off anyway and catered for the
people who are willing and able to pay them hard cash they won't otherwise
get.

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tptacek
I didn't make the comparison, you did, so I'm going to refrain from pursuing
this thread.

I think foundries are as likely to lose money to web fonts as make it, because
the people who truly value distinctive typography already pay for it, and the
mass market uses Papyrus and Comic Sans.

~~~
Silhouette
> I didn't make the comparison, you did

My comparison was not between foundries and music labels, but between selling
fonts and selling music, stock art, etc. The point wasn't who was doing the
selling, it was that you can do just fine selling at much cheaper prices to a
much wider audience, and that such a model fits the reality of the Internet
much better.

> I think foundries are as likely to lose money to web fonts as make it,
> because the people who truly value distinctive typography already pay for it

But prior to the web font services, there was no way for people to give money
to the foundries to use their fonts on web sites, even if they wanted to.

And for those projects where an ongoing rental payment is not a suitable
pricing model, there still isn't, which means the foundries aren't even
accepting money from people who do value high quality typography and would
happily pay for the chance to use it. I just don't see how that makes any
business sense at all.

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latitude
Now. One thing to keep in mind before everyone cringes hearing _Adobe_.

Adobe has always been a _very_ web friendly foundry. They permit things like
Cufon use under their _standard_ EULA that covers hundreds if not thousands of
fonts. Few years ago, when asking a foundry for a web license would typically
produce "La-la-la-la. Can't hear you. Web doesn't exist.", it was unbelievably
liberal. It wasn't a fluke either, it was an intentional decision driven from
the inside by those from the font group.

In other words, if there _is_ a larger company that I would like to see
acquire Typekit, that would be Adobe. They may have screwed few things here
and there, but they totally get the webfonts.

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nhangen
More innovation dying before it gets the chance to thrive. I thought Typekit
needed a few more years on its own to become prolific, and though I don't
fault them for selling, I think this blows.

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jontas
If this gets adobe fonts into typekit's library, that would be great.

I just really don't want the pricing to change, even if it means no adobe
fonts.

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antidaily
I couldn't get over the pricing. I'm not doing a yearly subscription based on
pageviews to use some nice fonts on my site. Just me?

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atourgates
I think their pricing becomes much more compelling at the portfolio level.
$4/mo is completely reasonable for web designers building sites - as is their
Performance pricing for more pageviews.

Though, I wouldn't be shocked to see Adobe jack those prices up. They've never
been keen at competing on price.

~~~
antidaily
$4/mo is definitely reasonable. However, I would much rather pay double and
host the fonts myself. I realize that's the tradeoff with the type foundries,
but for client work, I think I would get a lot of pushback billing them
monthly for a design they paid for a year ago.

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trebor
I, for one, am shocked that I didn't see this one coming. Adobe has a great
suite of fonts, and with HTML5 and the open web killing flash they'll need
some new thinks to keep in the market.

