“Hey Girl, Let’s turn down the lights and try some negative leading. YOU. ME. Yeah that’s nice”
Beginning his talk with a light-hearted and humourous quote taken from the satrical website Ryan Gosling, the Typographer, Ivo Gabrowitsch, Marketing Director of FontFont, then went straight into the more serious and sober topic of the future challenges of the Font Business.
From the very first FontFont, FF Beowolf, a random so-called ‘living’ font as no glyphs ever look the same, through to last year’s highly successful and bestselling FF Chartwell, a font that makes charts which was designed by Travis Kochel.
He then gave an impassioned and fascinating talk about the demands and challenges that are facing the font industry right now.
The overriding theme was that ‘Things are getting complicated’. He sought to address three questions “What do customers want? What do customers need? What do customers deserve“ and focused on three main areas, Font Making, Font Tools and Font Licencing.With the rapidly changing landscape of technology and the breadth and depth of communication channels, font foundries are faced with a multitude of dilemmas. From the problems that screen resolution pose, such as the fact that you read texts 25% slower than normal and in not such a concentrated manner, through to the the growing demand for global fonts that support numerous languages, the work involved for font foundries is no mean feat. Other notable demands placed on the industry include the growing desire for large families that offer numerous styles (FontFont’s largest family, FF Clan, contains an incredible 84 styles), the need for original typefaces and the fact that OpenType features for webfonts will be coming to a browser near you soon.
Ivo Gabrowitsch
Another challenge that font foundries, and argably the font industry, face is helping customers navigate the sheer volume of typefaces that exist in order to find what they need. This is further complicated by the multiple numbers of formats that are offered by different foundries, FontFont only offers four but this can still cause problems and confusion.
Ivo mentioned numerous tools and apps that are now offered by companies such as MyFonts What The Font, FontShop’s FontBook App and FontShop Plugin and FontFont’s FontFonter and Subsetters but he argued that more needs to be done to educate and guide customers in their buying choices.
The complexitity of the licencing also causes massive problems, customers have such specific questions related to a particular app or intended use for television screens, eBooks or other technology. Such requests leads to a continual back and forth of emails trying to address the issues and sometimes ends up with customers not actually even buying anything, leaving neither the customer nor the retailer happy.
So in the midst of all these challenges, what was Ivo’s solution? In a word, simplicity. A simplified licencing model is in the pipeline. So, watch this space …
