zlacker

It's not a contrarian take. The argument I'm making is simple. If you're doing functional type design, such as setting a book or a magazine article or a user interface, you have a wealth of viable faces available that do not involve per-impression licensing; many are free, some even came installed with your computer. If you're doing logo design, everything is out the window anyways: a wordmark is an aesthetic statement. If you're a designer, and you're designing a mark, and your best idea requires you to license a Monotype font with per-impression licensing, and you don't want to do that, just use your next best idea. That design challenge is really not much different than having your best idea depend on access to NYT Cheltenham, which you can't use at any price. Or, for that matter, the vectors of the FedEx logo.

I'm not blowing you off. I'm taking your argument seriously. It just doesn't hold.

>>tptace+(OP)
> If you're doing functional type design, such as setting a book or a magazine article or a user interface, you have a wealth of viable faces available that do not involve per-impression licensing; many are free, some even came installed with your computer.

This is well put and thanks for engaging with the argument in good spirits.

I imagine that fonts often matter a lot for brand identity and specific use cases (like programming) will also have specific aspects of importance (like ligatures in particular to a lot of folks and being able to tell symbols apart at a glance so IloO0 etc. don’t present issues, but for many use cases some utilitarian “good enough” choice will suffice, because there are a lot of competently made free fonts out there.