We’ve experienced font licensing from all angles – working as solo designers, in design studios, negotiating with foundries on behalf of global clients and also as a font publisher. It’s a complicated business but by identifying common ground we plan to make the process as simple as possible for all parties.
We’d like the experience to be as much as possible like buying a physical, off the shelf product; something that’s clearly labelled and priced, and yours to use as you like for as long as you like…
Everything in one box/package/file.
In order to do this we had to eliminate as many variables as possible, replacing a complex matrix of individual styles, licenses for different media, and scope of use with one license for all media and all styles, and with one metric to gauge value.
All Styles – All Media – One Metric – One License
The Metric: Company size not number of users
What if I only want to buy individual styles?
‘But wait’ you say – ‘all styles and all media sounds great but I’m not about to fork out for an Enterprise licence’. We said the exact same thing, and really want to work with our simplified Fonts in a Box idea. So our prices are based on a fair price, judged across the industry, for 1-2 styles with a desktop/web license.
We understand that most customers only really need a few styles of a font. Generally, for projects big or small, designers follow the rule that for simplicity and consistency you shouldn’t use too many styles of a font (or too many different fonts). This is reflected in most corporate brand guidelines as they conventionally only specify two weights to differentiate between headlines and body copy, and maybe the equivalent italics.
We’d rather keep everything simple and give you the full flex of the font for you to play around with as you like, for the price of the one or two styles you’ll probably end up using. For designers, it’s better you have the whole family and test it out to see if it’s a fit for different clients, projects, contexts, wordmarks, layouts, hierarchy… play with it in its entirety, and we want you to be able to do that.
For clients we respect that it can be hard—especially for new companies—to predict exact usage across which media, and that brand guidelines evolve as new use cases are added. The fonts a core design team chose based on the current known scope use might not work for a web team when they come to actually build a website. They might for example, have preferred a light font for readable body copy on screen, rather than the regular the brand team specified and bought the license for. It’s important to make sure creative opportunities aren’t limited and the full flex of the fonts can be explored and deployed.
So one EOAW! license gets you the whole family, for any media, for roughly the price of a desktop/web combo for 1 or 2 styles relative to the size of your company.
What about a distribution license?