Designers who used to earn their living with royalties will have to find a different source of income, as their previous income will be radically slashed.

There is an imminent announcement from Monotype that will offer flat-rate pricing. Tell me about how Fontstand will address the problem of fairness in type licensing practices.Adobe Typekit started offering font subscriptions where designers receive minimal royalties (perhaps only a few designers get something, but 90% of the fonts that constitute the collection receive just breadcrumbs). I asked Bilak to give the Daily Heller more details about this new means of distributing font profits among creators. The revenue from font rentals is fairly shared with the designers, which enables them to continue to create fine typefaces. Fontstand lets users test these fonts for free and then rent them on a monthly basis for a fraction of their regular price. At the same time, existing font-licensing models are proving unwieldy, and they don’t give customers the option to try out fonts before buying them.Īs a response to these problems, on May 22 Peter Bilak and Fontstand BV in the Netherlands launched Fontstand, a Mac OS X application that gives users access to thousands of high-quality fonts from some of the world’s most renowned foundries. As more digital content is moving to flat-rate subscription services, font foundries are concerned that creators of quality typefaces won’t be able to make a living when their assets are controlled by near-monopolies.

Fontstand application