The Reflex Blue Show with Nate Voss and Donovan Beery, Episode 3
On this week’s episode of The Reflex Blue Show, Donovan, David Kadavy and I discuss — at length — Adobe’s new Font Folio Education Essentials, and scarcely anything else. Type fans grab a cold one, but type-snobs are advised to skip the majority of the recording due to the vast levels of typographic ignorance on display here. We do manage a fairly thorough discussion of font-pricing and value, as well as cover the AFFEE from top to bottom.
–nv–
Download The Reflex Blue Show with Nate Voss and Donovan Beery, Episode 3 (23 meg) or click here to subscribe directly from the iTunes Music Store.
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Haven’t listened to this one yet, but the recent release of Safari 3.1 had me thinking about an old BADGroup posting that deals with fonts:
Safari 3 supports CSS Web Fonts (amongst other things non-type related). This means that you should be able to use fonts installed on the server side of things, rather than just on the end users system. From what I’ve read, it supports OpenType and TrueType. Given the pace at which these things take off, it’ll be a long time until you can really use it. Still, pretty exciting.
I am a spec artist for a newspaper advertising department and we have 124 Keplers in our suitcase. None of us really know why. I couldn’t quit laughing when you guys mentioned this!
Hilary, I think the question you should be asking is what happened to the other 44 Keplers in your suitcase?
Nate, iTunes for fonts has been available for awhile in Linotype’s Font Explorer. Pricing isn’t the same, but the interface was pretty close.
For as much as I’d love the option of cheap, good fonts, I think that as designers we’re overly hard on font pricing. We pay $350 for a stock photo with a one-time use license without batting an eye, but a $150, five-user license that allows for multiple uses of a font family seems ludicrous. The bright side, it’s a work expense, and therefore, should be deductible. You may also be able to factor the cost of a font into your quote on a job, much like photography.
In terms of the educational version of fonts, I’d really check out the EULA. As I recall, the old educational versions of Flash and Dreamweaver stated the boundaries of what they considered educational work in terms of things like print run quantity.
It’s never made sense to me to pay for an educational version only to disregard the license. To my knowledge, you can’t be kinda legitimate, it’s one or the other. Always seemed like I could a) embrace my piratey-ness, b) fool yourself into thinking that you’re not cheating the system so that you can sleep better at night, or c) pay up and be legal fo’ sho’. I’m not 100% yet, but I’m trying to get there.
Also of note: OS X (10.5) includes several weights and styles of Helvetica Neue. Take that, Comic Sans!
While I’m embarrassed to find that there are versions of Kepler – amongst the 168 – that are Geometric Moderns, I’m still puzzled at why they are still called “Kepler.”
Named after astronomer Johannes Kepler.
http://www.linotype.com/57424/kepler-family.html#
Awesome show!
Did you hear about the $1,000 typeface because of a font being pirated by some guy named Randu?
http://letterheadfonts.com/piracy/thousanddollarfont.php
As Justin said, Linotype has a store for buying fonts either in family suites or individual faces. Screenshot.