Subscribe to New PostsHow Important Is Open-Source Typography To You?
About a year ago, we here at A Good Company™ started a little project called The League of Moveable Type. We were frustrated by the lack of web-useable fonts available, professional quality free fonts, & the outright hostility towards the idea of open-source typography.
Since starting The League, we’ve been receiving a lot of support on the idea of high quality free fonts, but we’re wondering where people stand when it comes to open-source typography.
Free but Not Open?
One of the issues that we ran into is that there are designers who want to contribute their typeface to The League, but they have concerns about making their typeface open. They don’t have a problem with making their typeface free to use, but when it comes to letting other people make modifications to their work, this is where many designers feel uncomfortable, here are some reasons why:
- Crappy changes to the font could give my good font a bad name
- Giving away control of my font means I can’t make money off it
- Too many people working on a typeface won’t work
But anyone could change my font…
Because the Open Font Licensing doesn’t allow anyone to release a modified typeface under the same name as the original, there could only be one version of the original typeface, other derivates would be considered as a different font, with a different name. So having fonts that look similar is competition not replacement.
Imagine I’m looking for a font to use in a mockup I’m working on, and I want a geometric sans-serif. Perhaps I’ll consider Futura, Gotham, or Nevis. Notice the ‘or’ – could those fonts not all have been modified versions of the same font? Take Futura & move around pieces, but you can’t call it Futura – suddenly there’s a new competitor.
But aren’t I helping the competition…
People are often loyal to brand names they like. So if you release an open-source font that everyone likes, and you’re selling other weights of that font, most people would choose to use the name they’re familiar with, rather than using a similar derivative.
Here, let’s pretend you’re in dire need of a bold weight for Junction. Junction is open source, and let’s pretend someone already took that source & made up a bold weight. Since it can’t be named the same, let’s say that font was called Bridge. Oh, but then, Caroline, the original creator, made her own bold version – which subtly, if not drastically, looks different than Bridge – and named it Junction Bold, for the very reasonable price of $29.
You’re looking for a bold version of Junction. You could buy Junction Bold, or a different font named Bridge. No one’s claiming 100% customer loyalty here, but now it’s a matter of which font is best, and if your font is as good or better, brand name recognition is a hefty selling point.
But collaboration doesn’t work…
We agree that the landscape at this point for collaborative typemaking is pretty sad. As in, nonexistent.
Hopefully by now, you’ve heard the name Lettercase being thrown around. We’ve been vague on the purpose, because it’s in the earliest (the earliest stages of development), but now seems a good time to fill you in. We want to change the perception of open source typography, and to do it, we’re doing some landscaping ourselves.
There was a time when software programming suffered the same cynical close-mindedness that typography suffers from today, and we’re taking our cue from there. If we can make a tool that makes collaboratively developing a typeface easy, it’d change everything. Amatuers could grow, professionals could work together more easily, and anyone just interested could have a place to learn from.
We’re paying a lot of attention to Github, and in a broad sense, you can imagine Lettercase being a similar tool. Private & public projects, either for something you don’t want to share or for something open source; collaborators, working together on shared projects; forking , or duplicating existing projects, that both pay respects to the original creator & allow you to mess with it & make something new. These are important ideas that helped propel the crazy success of open source software, and we don’t see any reason typography can’t benefit from the same.
An Important Crossroads
But this is the point where we have to assess what to do. Is open source typography important enough to fight for? Are we all brave enough to do something to change the status quo? Is the status quo okay, do we really need to change anything at all?
Is open source typography a fight worth fighting, or is free typography good enough? What do you think?
