Pascal Klein of klepas.org fame recently linked to an interesting discussion of free fonts on Typophile. It’s an interesting, but disappointing insight into the collective industry.
With web fonts around the corner and a purported great depression looming, type design may be having trouble adjusting. In the same way newspapers and other copyright driven industries are adapting to the new “something for nothing” mentality of the Internet, type designers and foundries ought to keep ahead of the curve.
Tom Hodgins says:
Apple and Microsoft may have the money to license typefaces from other groups, or pay to have typefaces developed for them, but a community-built operating system depends on the community to contribute each in their own little way.
[...] I urge all of you who benefit daily from open-source technology (Firefox, Openoffice, even Typophile is hosted on a linux server) to consider contributing some of your work towards the community that has provided you with so much software.
It’s a polite enough request by any standards, and is how a lot of free projects start to pick up momentum. On the contrary, very little enthusiasm followed with most responses dismissing the idea as foolhardy.
One participant agreed to participate in the proposed project, for a sum of $40 000. Another discounted the free software movement as nothing but the culmination of work by multinationals like Google, Apple, and IBM.
Starting a Dialogue
So what do we have to do to encourage design professionals contribute toward free software projects? We’ve already got stunning artists working on projects for Red Hat and Novell, and community efforts focused around Ubuntu, but a lot of type designers indicate that a collaborative effort in their industry is a ripe medium for tantrums. Nobody wants someone else meddling with their serifs.
I think the thing that really needs to be addressed is the current viewpoint that font creation is a large task for a small, professional team. I think if the open source community wants to encourage type artists to contribute, there needs to be open source tools to facilitate that a more distributed approach. A specialised versioning system could allow collaborative ad-hoc editing for instance, where a small group of project managers could drive the ultimate direction of the font as a whole.
Just because a contribution isn’t production quality, doesn’t mean it’s completely useless.
Shifting a Mindset
Pascal Klein says:
I’m sick of this view that sharing and collaboration are the foul sinful vermin that will eat away the pillars of one’s industry.
While a few hundred artists each contributing a few letters to an overall typeface might sound like a disaster, one only has to look at the Tango icon project to see that a set of style guidelines can go a long way toward standardising a design as a cohesive whole. We know it’s possible, but the first instinct of the very designers who can make this work is to charge enterprise licensing fees.
In this regard it’s a more difficult problem to solve, as the art form has long been a highly commercial one. Computer software hasn’t always been proprietary and closed, so in that respect a precedent was already set in the ’80s for free software. Font foundries are only now starting to give away free samples and promotional faces, and are very reluctant to encourage sharing through schemes such as font embedding.
So what hope do we have for recruiting type designers for gratis work?
Open Baskerville
Pascal’s taken up the mantle on the project and with some reluctant help from the community managed to obtain some rough drafts of what he plans to turn into an Open Baskerville. There’s an enthusiastic few who are keen to contribute to the project, so given a year or two they’ll hopefully have a solid enough body of work to prove the naysayers wrong. In any case, it will be a very interesting evolution to follow.