FONTSTAND F IN FREE TRIAL FOR FREE
Napster upended the music industry and then iTunes made it easy to “do the right thing.” Apple Music and other streaming services are being challenged to remember that, for the most part, people are happy to pay for what they value. As Steve Jobs said in 2004, during the introduction of iTunes in Europe: “If you’re really going to compete with piracy, you have to offer a better product.We are proud and excited to announce Fontstand, a new Mac OS X application that lets you test fonts for free and rent them for a fraction of their retail price. As Bilak discussed in his talk on digital content licensing at TYPO Berlin this past May, piracy and creation go hand-in-hand. In the bigger picture, I think the type market is ripe for innovation as far as platforms and font licensing are concerned, and it’s not in the best interest of type designers or users to cede the innovation to corporate bean counters that see type as a commodity and users as nothing more than a revenue stream.”Īs with that indie musician you love listening to on Bandcamp, it feels good knowing your money is going directly to the artist, ensuring a sustainable economy for more quality type. “I think each foundry has different reasons for joining we saw it as a way to reach audiences that we haven’t been reaching. “Paul and I both know, respect, and like Peter and thought Fontstand was a really interesting idea,” says Schwartz. I’m also hoping that being able to try fonts will help designers explore new and different typefaces that they wouldn’t have seriously considered otherwise.”Ĭhristian Schwartz and Paul Barnes of Commercial Type got on board early with Fontstand. ( He wrote humorously about it on his site.) “I get lots of customers asking for trials, but it has been impractical for me to accommodate that,” he says. Tal Leming of Type Supply, one of the inaugural participating foundries, reiterates how cumbersome it was to handle requests for trials of his typefaces until he finally decided to just say no. As opposed to most free fonts you find with a web search, you have the confidence in knowing that those offered through Fontstand come complete with extensive OpenType features and glyph sets and have been kerned to perfection. The rows of specimens are pure eye candy for type lovers and you can sample any of them for hour. It’s fun to get your type from Fontstand. They brought Bilak’s former student Ondrej Jób to work on the interface and develop it into the gorgeous app it is today. “Andrej asked me what I thought about doing the same with fonts-making them available on reduced time-basis,” he explains. Previously, Bilak had experience rethinking content distribution with his excellent design magazine, Works That Work. Two years ago, Peter Bilak of Typotheque in The Netherlands teamed up with longtime friend and designer Andrej Krátky to work on a new business model for selling type. And any font you rent for 12 months is yours to keep. You can even share a font with a friend for an incremental increase in the rental fee. Or rent the entire family for the limited time you might need it for a one-off job, saving hundreds of dollars.
Now, instead of buying a complete font family, you can rent, say, just the extra bold italic if that’s all you need.
FONTSTAND F IN FREE TRIAL FOR MAC OS
Fontstand is an elegant and colorful standalone app for Mac OS that seamlessly allows you to browse, try, and rent carefully crafted typefaces from type designers and independent foundries of the highest caliber.
0 kommentar(er)
