Designers As Font Distributors?

Currently a wave swashes through the Twitter stream: Linotype updated its EULA and now permits embedding their fonts into non-commercial websites. This move as well as the upcoming start of the font-embedding service Typekit stimulated the discussion on the CSS3 feature once more. And all designers all around the globe are already envisioning the world wide web being a place of manifold and beautiful typography in the near future.

But some weeks ago I had a talk with my fellow students on fonts and licensing in view of another aspect. As we all browsed the lists in our Font Explorers and the catalogs of our favourite foundries to find the right font for our thesis documentations, the one or other desperate look was bandied because of the – for a student – unaffordable price of each one's particular object of desire. Myself ogled at Hoefler & Frere-Jones' Sentinel that day. And when we cried on each other's shoulder, we came to the conclusion that it was absolutely unfavorable as a designer to have to buy a font before being able to work with it.

We stated: As designers we should have any possible font available anytime without paying for the pure possibility of using it. Because we develope visual concepts and entire identities and choose the adequate typefaces to be used and sold with our work, we are actually the best and most passionated end-user font distributors. Any foundry should be interested in designers selecting their fonts. And they should consider the designer to a certain extent being a channel of distribution and licensing management. Isn't it the designer who cares for licensing and payment the very moment the font is used in a work for one of his clients or for his own purposes?

As a possible approach that takes the designer's role into account, I drew a parallel to the concept of Napster in Germany: as long as you are a subscriber to the service, you can download limitless songs from Napster's giant library and listen to it as often as you want to. Isn't this an idea for an alternative way of font distribution? Designers could subscribe to a service for free or a small monthly fee and would have access to a great library of fonts to choose from. Maybe they are DRM protected and managed via a Font Explorer-like software. Through the same service a standardized, clear and understandable way would be offered to the designer to easly handle license and payment matters for each work a font was used in. This would encourage us all to discover and try new fonts. And it would offer – especially to small and unknown foundries – an easy way to distribute their products. Isn't that worth a thought?