The True Cost of Free Fonts

The significance of typefaces in the design world is widely recognised. In an industry where conveying messages clearly and aesthetically is crucial, thoughtful font selection becomes necessary. The choice of typefaces goes beyond just aesthetics. It influences the overall tone and personality of a design. With numerous font resources accessible to designers and evolving technology for font management, acquisition, and creation, this article aims to explore some of the current challenges in the industry.

Different fonts evoke different emotions and associations, allowing designers to tailor the visual language to suit the intended message or brand identity. For instance, a sleek and modern sans-serif font may convey a sense of contemporary sophistication, while a classic serif font might evoke a more traditional and formal feel.

The concept of hierarchy in typography is another crucial aspect. Designers use varying font sizes, weights, and styles to create a visual hierarchy that guides the viewer's attention through the content. Headlines, subheadings, and body text are carefully arranged to create a smooth and engaging visual flow, improving the overall user experience. 

The placement of text within a design is yet another consideration. Strategic positioning can draw attention to key elements, create focal points, and contribute to the overall balance and composition of the design. And then there's colour; using colour thoughtfully in typography can strengthen brand identity, evoke specific emotions, or set a consistent visual theme.

While you can easily find articles and blog posts on using typography effectively in graphic design, there is limited discussion about the technical aspects of creating fonts—whether from font foundries or independent typeface designers. There's also very little conversation about the technical challenges when fonts are poorly made.

The Pros and Cons of Open-Source Fonts

This challenge has become more prominent with the introduction of open-source fonts to the market. Open-source fonts, which are licensed for unrestricted use, have gained popularity in recent years. The advantages of open-source typefaces, including their cost-effectiveness and availability in various formats, are widely acknowledged; there are some fairly significant downsides that are not discussed nearly as much as they should be.

Unfortunately, many open-source fonts have just one style, or if you are lucky, a regular and an italic version. While this may suffice for projects requiring a single-face display font, it proves limiting for projects requiring full typeface families that span the full spectrum from light to regular to semi-bold-semi-extended-italic font styles. Therefore, the more versatility sought in typefaces, the more challenging it becomes to find suitable options within the open-source world.

Quality can vary, with some fonts being of lower quality. Sorting through them to find high-quality, full-featured fonts is challenging. Even fonts from reputable sources like Google may have issues, such as incomplete glyph sets, poor kerning, missing ligatures, inconsistent letter forms and slants and improper file structures. These problems can lead to incorrect rendering, performance issues, and often system crashes, particularly concerning in product creation for lengthy formatted documents like educational books. The impact is a stressful production environment that takes time and skill to fix as well as potentially introduces errors that aren’t picked up in time before going to press.

A growing concern is font instability in product creation, especially with extensive documents. However, a significant factor contributing to these issues is poor font management and the existence of multiple versions of the same open-source typeface. 

Font Compatibility Challenges for Designers

Users downloading different versions of a font can unintentionally introduce compatibility issues within documents, particularly when the same font is available from multiple different sources (Google fonts and Adobe Fonts in particular). If the font that is activated on the designer’s computer isn’t exactly the same version as the one in the document it can cause significant issues with the layouts and rendering of the font. This issue is compounded by the fact that both Adobe and Google will update font versions with no warning and with no way to access previous versions easily. This issue often happens when designers change between versions of the same font, for example when working on different jobs for clients with different font policies, leading to rendering issues and management problems that impact production time. 

Adobe Fonts operates within a unique environment, where activating fonts already installed directly in the operating system or through other services like Google Fonts can trigger conflicts. InDesign, in particular, is sensitive to these conflicts and may display warning messages indicating missing fonts when opening a document, or worse, not give a warning because it thinks the correct font is activated but cause display issues that could potentially go unnoticed. Font files, much like applications, undergo continual revision and updating by typeface designers. These updates may include adjustments to letterforms, the addition of characters to support additional languages, or changes in spacing to improve readability and aesthetics. For example, Open Sans, a widely used typeface available on Google Fonts, has undergone multiple updates, introducing new weights and styles. Consequently, using different versions of Open Sans within Adobe Creative Cloud projects can lead to unexpected layout variations and rendering discrepancies as well as multiple crashes. In a production environment where efficiency and accuracy are critical, these compatibility issues present significant challenges for designers, necessitating time-consuming troubleshooting and the development of innovative workarounds.

We frequently encounter this issue in the projects we work on. In-house publishing design teams often select and use Google fonts in template designs. When we receive the handover, we download the necessary fonts, unaware they may have been updated. These seemingly identical fonts obtained at different times can actually have subtle differences due to ongoing updates and revisions by font designers. While minor, these changes can cause compatibility conflicts within documents and frustration for everyone involved. This is a reminder that designers and organisations must exercise caution when selecting and managing fonts and choosing stable, high-quality options from reputable sources to minimise technical obstacles and ensure seamless project workflows.

So, while open-source fonts have their merits, the potential technical challenges and limitations, such as incomplete styles and varying quality, can significantly impact the overall success of a design. 

Cost Implications and Solutions for Designers

There are, however, cost implications for designers and businesses when purchasing multiple font licences and investing in fonts throughout the production and design process. The expense of properly built fonts can be daunting for individual freelance designers, and unfortunately, some commercial businesses may not prioritise proper font licensing. 

Although the commercial benefits of investing in an expensive font for a one-off project may be limited for designers working on marketing materials for B2B or B2C purposes, going for a collection of well-built fonts could present a more cost-effective solution in the long run, provided it meets their specific commercial needs.

Many exceptional font foundries offer beautifully crafted and technically stable fonts, along with various font subscriptions and licensing models. While there's undoubtedly a significant creative advantage to purchasing individual fonts from independent foundries, the costs may become prohibitive for large publishing organisations and designers serving this industry, making it impractical to acquire everything from independent libraries.

Adobe Fonts, formerly known as Typekit, boasts a vast font collection included as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud Subscription. Every designer subscribed to CC already has access to these fonts. However, the subscription-based nature of Adobe Fonts means that fonts used in a project could potentially be removed from the library, posing risks for publishers whose projects extend beyond a year or involve reusing titles from their backlists. Adobe Fonts also work on an ‘always online’ model, meaning the fonts cannot be downloaded locally and cannot be activated if there’s no internet connection. Their servers have also been known to go down for several days in the past, which although incredibly rare, obviously has massive ramifications for production schedules because no work can be done on projects using Adobe Fonts during that period.

Monotype Imaging Inc, a major font foundry, has recently introduced a new payment model. In this setup, designers and agencies can choose professionally made fonts from their extensive library for projects, and the end client covers the licensing costs, similar to the way current photo libraries licence their images. The idea is to encourage designers to use stable, high-quality fonts that are well built and are aesthetically better to use on the page with far greater choice and quality without the upfront cost of investing in a font library that their clients may or may not decide to use.

Monotype also helps design agencies avoid investing repeatedly in various font libraries due to clients' changing policies. For companies like ours, adopting Monotype fonts in our production workflows and concept designs would lead to improved typography and more efficient production, reducing issues with documents and software bugs.

The new model offers incentives for designers to choose fonts from the Monotype Library. However, there are reports of some publishing houses struggling to afford the new licensing model. This ongoing versioning battle between Open Source and Adobe Fonts needs careful management and strategic planning across their lists. However, it might also highlight the gap between companies valuing design and those placing less emphasis on the impact of typography in communication. So whether this payment model will prove sustainable for everyone involved remains to be seen.

Summary

So, in summary, the ongoing issues between using Open Source and Adobe Fonts in production workflows still cause designers many headaches and issues. Publishing houses with costs in mind are not jumping onto the new Monotype licensing options. Instead, they have to develop strategies to mitigate the risks and issues inherent in continuing to use a mix of font types. 

Designers, whilst now having more of an incentive to use Monotype in their work, still ultimately have to be guided by their end client’s font policies. It’s too early to tell if Open Source fonts could be made more stable with better investment and font management systems. In the meantime, you need to keep an eye on the versions of fonts you are using in your production environment and, where possible, stick to just one type per project to avoid some of the issues we have highlighted.