over 7 years ago from Cristian Moisei, http://meet-cristian.com
I needed to buy a few licenses recently and having had problems with MyFonts in the past, I decided to look for alternative stores. I'll give fonts.com a shot this time.
What do you use?
Great selection, great sales, and they even have a rewards program.
Thank you Nicholas for using our site!
Hi Cristian, I'm the founder of Fontspring and would obviously love to have your business. As you may know, there has been a lot of consolidation in the font industry. Monotype has bought up many resellers in the past few years, including MyFonts, FontShop, Linotype, and Ascender. They also run their own Fonts.com.
There are still several independent resellers out there, including YouWorkForThem, FontBros, HypeForType, FontHaus, and Creative Market. One thing that sets Fontspring apart from everyone else is how we pay our "artists".
As far as I know, we are the only ones paying the font designers 65-70% of every single sale, plus an additional 17% if they utilize our affiliate program. The rest pay 50% (or considerably less, believe it or not, if the transaction is 5-6 figures and involves a sales person).
Monotype has been consistently dropping royalty rates for years, and has even lowered them on long-time vendors. They also, across the board dropped their affiliate commissions to 10% in January.
We work really hard for both our customers and our vendors. We honestly feel like this is a justice issue for our foundries. I'd encourage you to look into it and consider buying directly from the designer or a reseller that pays fairly.
Hope this helps!
Hi Ethan! I'm rather new at designing typefaces, for each new typeface I learn a million things, and I have a few fonts out there for sale (https://creativemarket.com/daniel.feldt).
How would I go about having fonts for sale at Fontspring? Do you have a application process like MyFonts or can anyone sell?
I can't seem to find anything about that on your webpage when I gave it a quick look.
Hi Daniel,
I'm the Ops Director at Fontspring. Please send us an email at foundries@fontspring.com and we'll get you set up with a vendor account.
In the mean time, you can read more about our foundry relations on our foundry info page.
We look forward to working with you!
Hello Christian, just so you know fonts dot com is owned by the same corporation who own myfonts, so the same policies will be used for the most part.
I am the owner of YouWorkForThem, which I founded 15 years ago as one of the first creative marketplaces. We work close with our foundrys and we pay them up to 70% in royalties. I'm a designer by trade and so are the majority of our team. We are not a corporation, with no shareholder agenda. If you ever have a question about buying and or licensing we are always happy (and quick) to help.
As Ethan from Fontspring suggested, support the foundry directly and or an independent vendor if you can. Most sites have beenbought out by corporations (Creative Market is owned by software giant Autodesk, TypeKit by another giant named Adobe). You will typically get more personal service and you will be supporting the designers and not corporate shareholders.
I typically buy stuff from YouWorkForThem, love the rewards program.
My favorite places for buying (I've skipped free sources) type are —
All these sites offer work from multiple foundries and sometimes their own. Commercial Type and Font Bureau represent the more exclusive and storied typefaces from many famous contemporaries in the field of type design today. While the others have such variety from the big guys and the little ones, that you'll find a great font. Sites like MyFonts are really good at comparing classic typefaces like Helvetica, Futura, or Garamond to help narrow down the cut that works for you.
Darden, Okay, House, and Sudtipos are great places to find display and specility typefaces that are very extensive and well crafted. Don't miss the cursive scripts from each of them. The ligatures and extended features are very exciting.
Their Mrs. Eaves font has held up through fad and fashion very well.
This Czech foundry is a little under the radar, but their recuts of Baskerville and Walbaum are exquisite. They've done a fantastic job modernizing classic types like those and others. They also have a few in-house fonts they've designed based on Czech morphologies that I'm dying to use on a future project.
Foundry's serif fonts are some of the best, and would be very well suited in editorial or print work.
After the messy split with Hoefler, Tobias launched his own foundry and offers one font currently. You'll also find some of his pre-Hoefler work on Font Bureau.
Based out of Copenhagen, these guys have fun and quirky type great for branding. I've used them on a few projects.
These Swiss foundries have very clean and sophisticated fonts with flair and whimsy built at a very subtle (or not so subtle) level. I haven't used any of their work yet, but I can see the potential.
I think these guys are underrated compared to Klim. I've found their type to be very well suited to pratical (even UI) as well as branding use.
The fonts here are expertly crafted and you can almost never go wrong using them. Their attention to detail and the craft of creating type is very evident. They're a powerhouse for good fonts, as they cover every major category well.
The typefaces here are great. They're boutique but very popular, like your favorite Indie brand.
Font Bureau and Commercial type are actually Foundries, and I wouldn't necessarily classify them with the others that you list under "collective". In the case of FB, a number of big names have passed through their employee roster over the years. Commercial type has a pretty regular roster of designers and collaborators, even if it's larger than some of the 1 or 2 person outfits that you've also listed.
Oh interesting — thanks for clarifying!
I don't buy fonts often, but Klim is my favourite. Smaller selection than most, but really high calibre, and not as overused as others out there.
I always feel more happy to part with my money when I buy a font directly from the designer — like Drew Melton
Or from a foundry — like The Designers Foundry or Commercial Type
Fontspring. Nice folks, flexible, understandable licences, great selection.
Thank you everyone for your suggestions. I will check them out.
I learned that fonts.com has a subscription plan for web-fonts where you can get all of their fonts for $10/m (or $300 for 3 years) to use in as many projects as you want, so I will most likely get that for future projects.
I use MyFonts mostly because they're always there.
Although I hold no loyalty to a specific site, and would gladly change that if I found another with comparable selection size and webfont options.
I've bought from biggies like Adobe to small-frys like Creative Market. For me it depends on the client, the project, and the budget.
For example, if a children's clothing company needs online advertising and social media stuff... I'll try and find something fun and lower-cost on a site like Creative Market. The font may be all-cap only, or missing a bunch of characters... but it works fine for the need... and looks refreshing in the end.
For a large-scale site or branding project... the need is very different.
Login to Comment
You'll need to log in before you can leave a comment.
LoginRegister Today
New accounts can leave comments immediately, and gain full permissions after one week.
Register now