
Subtle Sans: A Free (Pay What You Want) Font - chrisguitarguy
http://www.subtlepatterns.com/subtlesans/
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Matti
Set the default price to $15, $20 or $30 instead of the $1 that it's at now.
You'll increase the perceived value of the font while making a ton more money.
There's no point in having the initial price "anchored in" at the ridiculously
low price of one dollar.

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benbjohnson
Personally I am not a fan of "pay-what-you-want" products. It sounds very
utopian but it neglects the cost of a guilty conscience. I try to derive a
fair price in my head but it's still a balancing act between feeling like I
underpaid and I'm a jerk or I overpaid and I'm a chump.

Overall, pay-what-you-want feels more like marketing than a socialist ideal.

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corin_
I suspect this is very similar to tipping - many people say that it's
illogical, or that they hate it, or it makes them feel awkward... but
personally I love tipping, it's something I am actively happy about when in
America (not so much tipping here in the UK).

Personally, if the service is terrible I'll leave no tip, if it's standard, as
expected, I'll leave a generic tip (something like 10-20% in restaurants,
depending on the total price), if it's great I'll leave a generous tip.

I often feel good being able to thank someone by tipping well, and the only
times I have ever felt bad about it were when I wanted to tip more but didn't
have the change on me and there was no way to add the tip to a card payment.

So I guess it's just different people prefer different situations socially.

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darklajid
That's a good point that can support both your position - and the gp.

I'm totally with you regarding tipping. Coming from DE this is something
you're doing voluntarily, for good service and as much as you like. It's a
'well done' or 'thank you'.

Now I'm in IL and here it is - for all intents and purposes - mandatory. The
bill says 'SERVICE NOT INCLUDED' (yes, often in caps. Some waiters like to
make sure that foreigners 'get it' by saying it again once or twice or using a
marker to make it even more prominent on the bill). You are expected to give a
tip of 10%. Service is shitty, food was crap? If you don't give the tip,
people might come after you and discuss it.

Since I loathe that custom I could understand if the gp has a similar mindset,
feeling _forced_ to pay up.

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mikeklaas
Seems amateurish and affectedly geometric to my eye. Good effort, but not
really suitable for serious use.

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superfamicom
Very elegant! It's similar to Ostrich Sans but different enough to warrant
having around.

<http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/ostrich-sans>

With so many fonts free, and some like Ostrich Sans completely open source, it
will be interesting to see who would pay, and why.

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chrisguitarguy
I downloaded the font and donated. I like Subtle Patterns and what Atle Mo [1]
is doing and wanted to support it. Chances are fairly good that I won't use
the font for anything serious, but sometimes paying for something isn't about
the product you get.

1\. <http://atlemo.com/>

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draggnar
Subtle patterns is a great resource - stylish, modern, free - I get background
patters from there all the time.

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taitems
Just an FYI, the whole site looks naff in Windows because of the use of
"Lucida Grande" and no font-stack degradation. Even a "sans-serif" fallback
would have sufficed.

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twog
You can check out <http://losttype.com/> for some awesome fonts with the same
pay structure

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singlow
"All the numbers you need: 123456789" - I guess zero is optional?

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chrisguitarguy
From the text below the slider:

> You have A to Z, plus the Norwegian characters Æ Ø & Å, and numbers 0 - 9.
> All caps.

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singlow
Sorry I just thought it was funny that the slide only gave 1-9 after making
that statement.

Nice looking font - thanks for posting it.

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calpaterson
It's unhelpful that the demonstration contains precisely zero lowercase
letters, and don't show what it looks like in a small size. Those are two big
considerations when buying a font.

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jmreid
I'm guessing you didn't actually read the site?

"CAPS AND LETTERS You have A to Z, plus the Norwegian characters Æ Ø & Å, and
numbers 0 - 9. All caps."

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calpaterson
Thanks, it's obvious that those characters are available. It wasn't talking
about that. They aren't demonstrated. For someone telling me to "read the
site", you didn't actually read my comment that carefully.

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vineel
I think what jmreid is trying to say is that Subtle Sans doesn't have lower
case characters.

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digitallimit
How do I install this for use on my website? I've never included fonts before,
outside of the Google Web Fonts API which just asks I stick a link tag in the
template.

<link href='<http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Oxygen> rel='stylesheet'
type='text/css'>

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blueprint
This might help <http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator>

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reneherse
Love the "R" in regular weight! I have no idea what the style is called, but
drawing the right hand side of the letter so that it avoids intersection with
the left-hand vertical stroke is my favorite way to do it. :)

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DanBC
Thank you for this.

If anyone from subtle patterns is reading it would be really nice if you could
increase the contrast of the body text to the background. Mid grey on white is
hard to read.

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olivercameron
This is awesome. Beautiful examples make such a difference. However, every
time I try to buy it for $10, PayPal checkout says it'll cost $1.

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Strom
The PayPal form seems untested, because all the options have the same value of
$1.

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mgcross
The font looks great, but it would be nice if the headline and body copy were
set in Subtle Sans to provide a live preview.

~~~
goblin89
Judging by typeface design, samples, and description, the font isn't designed
for body copy. Also, right now on the page font samples themselves play the
role of “huge, super thin headline”—having more than one of these usually is
not a good idea from visual design standpoint, so I wouldn't use it for
headline as well with current layout.

That said, it would make perfect sense to have headline set in Subtle Sans,
but with larger font size and font samples moved to a less prominent place.

By the way, the Download button actually uses Subtle Sans (not the best place
for it IMO though).

Typeface is important, but not as much as knowing how to use it properly. In
this regard, typographic solution from Twitter Bootstrap brought a very nice
change to the world of ‘developer-built’ websites appearance.

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voxmatt
Very cool. This is only tangentially related, but I was surprised (and
delighted) to see that Ideal Sans is available for free from Google web fonts.
It is one of the truly top-tier fonts on Google web fonts; so if you're
considering a sans... (I really don't have a dog in this fight; just passing
along a deal)

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verbosus
Ideal Sans is a proprietary typeface by the Hoefler & Frere-Jones type
foundry, and it is most definitely not available for free on Google Web Fonts.
[http://www.typography.com/fonts/font_overview.php?productLin...](http://www.typography.com/fonts/font_overview.php?productLineID=100042)

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tptacek
Ideal isn't even available on Typekit. HFJ is fussy about webfonts.

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santry
According to Jason Kottke HFJ has their own webfonts service in private beta.
He's using their Whitney font with this new service in his redesigned site:

<http://kottke.org/12/03/kottkeorg-redesign-2012-version>

~~~
tptacek
Frere-Jones (I think it was him?) recently gave a talk about HFJ's web font
strategy. My understanding is that it's going to be idiosyncratic.

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wildmXranat
Neat looking font. I wonder how the price distribution will end up looking.

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huhtenberg
What is this doing on the frontpage?

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SquareWheel
I don't care for the fonts myself, but it's really cool to see more industries
try out the pay-what-you-want model. It's starting to become large in gaming
especially, and I really hope it does well. Lately everything seems to be
going towards "micropayments", and that really scares me.

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javajosh
What's wrong with micropayments? "If you're not paying for the product you are
the product," and all that.

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SquareWheel
For me it's because they're so often used in an exploitative way. I'll use
gaming again as my example. Look at Farmville, or what seems like the majority
of mobile games lately. It's so common to see "Pay $2 for mojo points" or
whatever their pretend currency may be, and used to sell virtual items. Now
that in itself isn't evil, but these items are often things to make the game
less "grindy", and so developers are encouraged to add grind in the first
place to maximize profit. The developer isn't focusing on making the best
possible experience for the player anymore.

That's true mostly with Farmville (buy a tractor to double your harvest
speed), but other games take this on as well too. Another example: Companies
want to sell over-priced map packs and such, and so will stop the modding
communities from creating their own content. If there aren't user submitted
maps the company can sell their own for far more.

I used games as an example because it's the easiest for me to come up with
examples, but I think this extends into other mediums as well. To me,
micropayments change the focus of the publisher of that medium to look for
profit where they didn't before, and that creates a worse product.

This is a very loose idea I've had in my head for a while and I haven't put it
all together like this before, I'm certainly not an expert on business models
or anything like that. This post is purely conjecture on my part.

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javajosh
Well, I feel you on the not-liking-abusive-games thing. But I don't think
that's a mark against micropayments per se. I mean, that would be like saying
that most criminals deal in cash, so cash is evil (which, by the way, is an
argument I've actually heard before.)

Don't throw the baby (micropayments) out with the bathwater (abusive games).

