Yet again I'll have to use someone's arbitrary font-serving service instead of using @font-face and hosting the fonts myself. I'd really prefer to just purchase the font, but this is surely more profitable.
Also, check out this section for a laugh: http://www.typography.com/cloud/how-it-works/#the-delivery-a... . "It constructs an application capable of recognizing requests from different browsers." Apparently a few lines of CSS counts as "an application" these days.
None of the major foundries are OK with you embedding fonts into web pages by publishing their fonts as resources on the web, there to be downloaded by anyone else who wants to compose documents with those fonts.
None of the major foundries are OK with you embedding fonts into web pages
I suspect they'll learn better with time, just as other content creation industries have learned or are learning.
It is artificial to use a subscription model for something that is basically a one-off resource. Compare the web font services with licensing fonts for printing or licensing just about any other stock resource for web development, for example.
It seems particularly odd for a foundry that normally aims at the high end of the market like H&FJ to go down this path. Not to belittle all the hard work that no doubt went into these fonts, but at text sizes, on today's screens, on an average quality web site, many visitors aren't simply going to see much difference between a good free font and the most finely-tuned Gotham or Archer, and they're certainly not going to see much difference between a good commercial font from one of the established services that charge significantly less and anything H&FJ offer. However, the pricing model they've picked here appears to be aiming for mainstream rather than the kind of exclusive/high-end sites where their extra polish might be in its element and necessary to maintain the look of quality that the site wants to show.
No doubt they'll be successful anyway, at least for a while, as plenty of places seem happy to jump on the bandwagon at the moment. But I wonder how long this X-as-a-Service gold rush to the cloud will last for before decision-makers start openly questioning whether all these mechanics are just a way of grabbing revenue and whether the extra costs they pay are really justified. Most parts of the tech industry already seem to be going the other way.
I suspect other foundries will follow them eventually, because competition from things like Google Web fonts and younger typographers is going to make it very difficult to justify refusing to allow use on the web without a subscription and reliance on a third-party server.
Yes though to be fair most of the older established foundries do not yet offer web fonts. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out, but as a designer I'd be hesitant to recommend signing up to any 'cloud' service like this to a client, because they're then at the mercy of that provider, who may suddenly decide to up rates year after year for the font which is central to their brand. This is what scares me about the Adobe cloud too - the terms right now are quite reasonable, but when Adobe needs to squeeze more money from customers, those renting software will have no choice but to pay out the new rates, whatever they may be. I see why this is attractive for foundries, Adobe etc, but I don't see the attraction for customers.
I much prefer paying once for a font and then using it indefinitely, and I'd prefer to compensate a type designer directly for that, instead of paying a foundry. So to me a model where you buy a copy of the font direct from the designer would be more attractive.
It seems to me that downloading a subset of a typeface from a webpage would be less practical than downloading an entire collection from a torrent.
Concerning the service itself: according to their product page, H&FJ requires you to include a remote stylesheet rather than javascript. I would say this is the "minimum viable evil" if you are striving to centralize distribution of your webfonts; while annoying, there are some advantages for the user (in this case, free Akamai).
Edit: I just checked a couple of torrent search engines and, apparently, there are not many up-to-date torrents for H&FJ typefaces. In hindsight, I suppose that the population of individuals who are likely to share files illegally and that of professional/dedicated designers have very little overlap.
The people who download fonts from torrents know what they're doing. If it was trivial to copy fonts off of web pages, people would routinely violate H+FJ's license without even realizing it; H+FJ would be in the unpleasant position of having to police the Internet and educating all those people who'd be surprised to hear that the one piece of markup / technology they can't crib from another site is the font, but only if it's an H+FJ font, and...
I may or may not have had no trouble whatsoever pirating an enormous variety of fonts off a website I found with a quick google search. Maybe torrents just aren't where they are?
In my experience too, websites with direct downloads are better. It is easy to make webfonts even when FontSquirrel marks the font for copyright too if you have a software like FontLab. Just remove the designer/copyright information in the Font Info menu.
I'll take it back. I was thinking of their general font EULA that comes with the Type Collections and it is very liberal when it comes to web-embedding. It's permissive of Cufon and others, but not @font-face.
I can't speak as to how this service works, but web fonts, in general are really neat.
For example: The ability to specify a font subset, so that only the 7 glyphs you actually use in your company name can be downloaded instead of the entire font, changing the data moved for just that single transaction from several megabytes to a few kilobytes. Extrapolate that to a handful of faces and a few hundred thousand visits and it adds up pretty quick.
Not to mention you can now stop using Comic Sans. :o)
And then you can wait for the cease and desist letter to arrive, since none of H+FJ's typography.com faces are licensed for use on the web outside their service.
I don't think there is a price for "serving it yourself on the web"; outside of a small number of early beta users, the professional websites you saw using H+FJ fonts were probably using image replacement.
What makes this different from typekit? It's quite a bit more expensive ($99 for 250,000 pageviews on cloud.typography vs $49 for 500,000 on typekit) and I'm wondering what extras it provides.
Their typography foundry is held to be second-to-none among typeface quality and frequency of usage in print and elsewhere.
In particular, their typeface Gotham is incredibly popular, and making it available as a webfont publicly is a big deal.
Also, this effort has been underway for at least three years. Their attention to detail ensures that these webfonts are going to be some of the best available anywhere.
An analogy might be that Typekit is the Netflix of typography, while H&FJ are the HBO of the market. Gotham is Game of Thrones. And this move is the typographic equivalent of making HBO Go available as a standalone subscription.
It doesn't seem to provide much in the way of competing directly with Typekit. Still, this is big news for a lot of people.
H&FJ is practically THE type foundry for original typefaces. They compete on quality rather than price or other tangible benefits. Unfortunately, it's been impossible to license H&FJ type for real web use until now.
The most likely group of people who will use this are type enthusiasts who prefer H&FJ type to the competition's. I can predict there are a lot of designers who will use this service for their personal or business sites.
As a competitive offering, though, this doesn't cut it. Buying individual fonts feels outdated to web font users, and the prices don't match up to Typekit (free with Adobe CC) or Monotype/Linotype ($10/month without a ridiculous 5 font cap).
H&FJ has chosen their business model, and they'd like to avoid the brand dilution of having poorly designed sites overusing their type. It's an interesting choice, and I hope it works out for them.
H+FJ doesn't serve the kind of user who feels that "buying individual fonts feels outdated", or who does price competition in the two digit range between different foundries. Instead, they sell to people for whom any price they could reasonably come up with for this service would be a rounding error.
Prior to launching Cloud Typography, H+FJ didn't sell web fonts at all. Things seemed to have been going pretty well for them.
H+FJ doesn't serve the kind of user who feels that "buying individual fonts feels outdated", or who does price competition in the two digit range between different foundries.
The pricing advertised on their site appears to contradict you.
They seem to be aiming for the mainstream market rather than exclusivity, yet their prices are uncompetitive by mainstream standards, which seems an odd strategy.
Of course -- H&FJ is an excellent foundry, and they're not competing in the same space as, say, Google Web fonts. That's what I mean by not competitive. It's a completely different league, as it sounds like you're well aware.
The people who like H&FJ for the quality will subscribe and use this service, while those looking for a commodity option will avoid it -- perhaps even to the benefit of H&FJ.
I know I'll subscribe shortly, which is why I hope this works for their business. It really is an interesting decision when compared to the providers whose offerings keep dropping in price to compete in a commodity market.
It's the same type of service, but H&FJ is their own foundry and none of their fonts were licensed through Typekit. This will, assumedly, be the only place to get H&FJ fonts (which is a big deal for typography nerds).
They're not trying to sell this to startups, they're trying to sell this to the Goldman Sachs website. These type of clients: 1) don't want the same fonts as everyone else, 2) want the high-quality typefaces of H&FJ, and 3) don't give a hoot what it costs.
First of all - a lot of the fonts available on Typekit - actually, anywhere, are, ahem, inspired by H&FJ.
This is the first offering that matches the H&FJ to quality. For instance, my favorite font at the moment is Ideal Sans. The concept here is to infuse a sans serif with an almost handlettered quality. There are no straight lines. Consequently it's hard to make it look good for the screen, period, let alone at small sizes. But they've done it.
Price wise, this is quite a bit less than I was expecting, especially considering that you get 5 free with subscription. Now just to wait and see how long it is before every site is using Gotham.
I run a couple of sites that generate 2 million page views a day. Using their prices, I'll be spending more on font subscriptions than the two dedicated servers I'm running. It's a pass here. I'd gladly pay maybe $50/yr to get permission to use their fonts, and a nice interface to preview, browse and generate the fonts I'd like to include. However, if they think I'm going to spend $700+ per month to include three or four webfonts on my site, they're out of their mind. There are countless similar webfonts available for free, and the difference in quality is not nearly worth the price to me, or my users. I think they need a new approach and pricing structure.
Click on show larger plans, which go up to 20 million monthly page views at $299/mo. I'd need roughly 60 million page views, so $900/mo, although they'd probably cut a wonderful deal at $700/mo.
The pricing is absurd. They think I'm going to shell out $10k/yr for using their web fonts? Where's the value here? Where's the return on my investment? If I'm spending $10k/yr on fonts, they better generate some additional revenue on my end. Also, my users better be jumping out of their seats at how impressive the difference is with and without their fonts. That's simply not the case though. I'm not in the business of throwing money out the window, and it could be better invested in countless other places.
Literally days after spending another couple days searching for a Whitney replacement for a site I'm working on and finally getting set up with Typekit. Still, this is something the entire design community has been looking forward to for a long time. I'll probably wait a while to give it a try for myself, but I am very interested in seeing how their fonts look across the web as others start to pick them up.
Join Cloud.typography and get your first five webfont packages FREE.
Choose from among H&FJ’s complete library of type families, known for
their plentiful styles and rich typographic features, each carefully engineered
to be fully functional in the browser.
and
Already purchased H&FJ fonts? Log in and start your subscription, and you’ll
find all your fonts available to use with Cloud.typography at no additional cost.
Buy fonts for your computer, and they’ll instantly appear in your
Cloud.typography webfont library, too.
…seems to indicate that you pay for a base subscription (based on pageviews) and they handle hosting/serving all the fonts that you've purchased. It's not "all-you-can-eat".
I believe it's all of them. If you go to any of the fonts (from the Font menu drop-down), there's a new "Webfonts" tab at the top (next to "Styles") that allows you to preview the fonts on the web. It seems to be there for every font, and it seems to include every weight and style.
Take this with a grain of salt since I can't find the source, but I vividly remember a designer wanting to use a H&FJ typeface (Gotham) on a project I was working on about a year and a half ago, only to have the H&FJ FAQ state that they don't allow web embedding and aren't developing it for what amounted to aesthetic reasons (i.e., web font technology was not far enough along for them to feel comfortable with the display of their type on screen.)
Now, instead, they're using the same technology as just about everyone else, under their own service, and just rehinted their typefaces to match the tech.
Actually the service itself launched as a private beta in early 2012 [1], while on the H&JF FAQ there has been a "work in progress" statement since at least 2011 [2].
If you use typekit, give Prenton a try. I was also on the hunt for a Whitney-as-body replacement and it's what I'm currently using. The proportions are very nice (versus the gothics you'll often see as recommended) and they have a condensed family if you need it. Freight Sans might work as well if you want something a little more modern.
Good. That's the right way to think about it. If free fonts are an option for your project, it's dumb to pay money for access to high-end designer fonts.
H&FJ are unusual not in their type design quality (of which they are just one of many) but in their very strong focus of branding and marketing. They are, basically, cool type design outlet and they are milking that as hard as they can.
So do Adobe, and Ascender, and other professional foundries, and several of their font families are available completely free.
Despite all the praise for H&FJ's quality from some posters here, I've got Photoshop and a 400% zoom that says their screen fonts still have to fit on the same limited number of pixels as everyone else's, and inevitably, the pixels that get turned on are similar to other well-hinted fonts at small sizes.
I've tried a few experiments, and I'm not seeing anything to suggest that H&FJ have some magic new technology that means their fonts are going to render better than everyone else's. Indeed, the quality of rendering in Firefox on Windows 7 appears to be somewhat variable: even some of the fonts on the linked page, such as the Whitney small caps used in headings, are far from crisp. The Archer small caps if you click through the "Learn More" link also seem to have obvious rendering/hinting problems at the top of many of the glyphs (and don't look anything like the "Firefox Windows" screenshot they show on their "Render Quality" page).
Maybe, but i'm excited by http://www.typography.com/cloud/the-fonts/, where they mention that all their fonts have: real small caps; old-style (text) figures; full range of individually drawn (not interpolated) weights; ligatures; even some old-style non-lining symbols like dollar signs.
If there are free web fonts that have all those, they are hard to find. (I don't even know how to use old-style figures ordinarily, although I'm not an expert in these things. But they imply that they have some custom (probably hacky cause that's what it would take) solution to some special glyphs "Cloud-typography includes tools for implementing advanced typographic features, and delivering them even to browsers that aren't designed to support advanced typography"; )
But yeah, clearly the market is people who care about things like in that list. Some of which are _very_ rarely seen on the web right now; if this leads to them being seen on the web more, it may increase the number of people who know what a 'non-lining figure' is, and then increase the market of people who want such things. And hopefully increase the number of free fonts that have em too (although you can have all those features and still be a poorly-designed font), as well as lead to actual standard ways to do things like text figures on the web.
Also, check out this section for a laugh: http://www.typography.com/cloud/how-it-works/#the-delivery-a... . "It constructs an application capable of recognizing requests from different browsers." Apparently a few lines of CSS counts as "an application" these days.