House Industries "Studio Lettering" font collection
My favorite type designers, House Industries, have a new set of fonts called Studio Lettering. The description is intriguing:
Before the era of digital publishing, highly-trained artists in lettering shops plied their talents to give personality to advertisements, editorials and package designs. While the eye-catching beauty of hand-drawn lettering is still relevant in today’s visual landscape, this bygone skill has sadly fallen to the wayside. Designer Ken Barber brings the lettering artist’s sensibilities back to the modern designer’s desktop with our new Studio Lettering collection. More than three years in development, these fonts use advanced programming to create living and breathing lines of text that escape the rigid constraints of traditional type to flow as they would from an experienced letterer’s hand. The first 200 purchasers receive a free 64-page hardbound Studio Lettering book!Price is $160. House Industries "Studio Lettering" font collection
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Ooh--do they have a version of Comic Sans? Coz that would be cool.
I've always really loved House's stuff. Even their catalogs are examples of graphic design at its best. I just wish I had $160 to spend.
I still think they're beautiful, but is this really an appropriate time for using swashy brush scripts?
Personally, I'm glad Helvetica replaced most of these 'hand-written' fonts in ads and such
Then, MirrorMonkey, I guess you haven't basked in the glory of House's Neutra font.
house industries, while offering lovely fonts, has (imho) an absurdly restrictive and unrealistic EULA - exactly the kind of thing that BoingBoing so frequently stands against. boo.
these EULA's tend to invite violation and imitation, the very things they are apparently designed to counter. boo hoo.
House Industries' EULA has kept me from purchasing a couple families.
$15K to license one typeface is silly regardless of my employers size. i'd love to read the minutes of that meeting.
that said, they really do have quite a few great looking fonts.
Honest Ed's in Toronto still has a small studio with a few old men hand lettering every single sign in the store. They're all absolutely stunning.
There is no doubt that House's fonts are impressive, with impressive price tags to match. The only thing more impressive than their products is the level of elitism they project in their FAQs. Just because they have "better taste" than plebs like me doesn't mean they need to be assholes about it.
THREE fonts for 160 clams? Oh wait, they do throw in a dingbat set. But man!
I know they pride themselves on quality lettery-style typesetting workmanship, but any comic artist who's good with a Wacom could have pulled these off, scanned, converted to vector, prepared, examined, and WHAMMO.
I'll download them elsewhere. And if I like, I buy. Seriously, though. Damn. Those are some stupidly expensive fonts. Kinda reminds me of the coat-hangers-as-high-end-audio-cables story for some reason.
Thank you , RangerGordon, for sharing (in #3) above, the link to the heartwarming story of a font that's lived it all, seen the highs and lows; Cooper Black.
"any comic artist who's good with a Wacom could have pulled these off..."
Not so much. There's a lot more to putting a font together than using Fontographer to trace a scan of old sign lettering. Besides drawing and preparing the full font alphabet (caps, lowercase, special and international characters) and adjusting for proper kerning and leading, a font house like House builds in OpenType functionality like automatic lowercase substitution, multiple variants of each letter than sub in organically, and display versions of capital letters for special applications.
$15k for a site license is kind of insane, but with the massive amount of font piracy out there, $160 for one of their font packs (which includes over a hundred pieces of vector clipart) is a pretty good bargain. If you can charge it to a job :)
@ rabinowitz
Wow. I just read through the FAQ's, and it really doesn't seem much like House at all. I've met personally met two of their lead designers (one, if not both, a founder), and they really didn't give off the impression that the FAQ did. They were a lot more laid back and humorous.
I'd venture a guess that that was written while they were reacting a bad situation, or an inbox full of the same questions they've heard over and over already. But then again, I don't claim to actually "know" them either, so I won't preach my opinion as absolute truth.
Ww. Wht bnch f slf-mprtnt sndng prcks. 'll wt fr thr prcs fnts t shw p n Prt By r Dmnd, thn pt thm n s mny fckng "rstrzng dvcs" s cn fnd.
Wow, "3000 Fonts for $19.95"? I'm headed to Wal-Mart!
$19.95.........AND YOUR IMMORTAL SOUL!!!!
That's good advice, gobo.
I just think that three fonts is a tad insulting. But nah. Maybe it's the way it's packaged. Know that I didn't mean any offense to those responsible for the fonts. They look incredible, and I'll concede that there are many considerations I hadn't weighed. As I said, I'll still buy them.
That's the kind of sucker I am, and I don't use piracy to the exclusion of a participatory economic role in the creative arts. If everything were reasonably priced, we'd have no need to pay such prices for anything, and we'd buy more stuff. So, whether these things are the crude oil or the Beanie Babies of the font world, they're bound to succeed. Ed Bernays would be proud.
As someone who infrequently prices fonts or examines the varying degrees of sophistication of cutting-edge font technologies, I misspoke. Still, to me, as one person, in today's world, it does seem rather an extreme wage to be made off of such few fonts - which are guaranteed to outsell others for their distinction alone, and perhaps or even invariably become overused by the third week before each new unveiling. I am the most reluctantly overspending person in the world. I do it like a fiend, and I admit it, but I hate it. It's a selfish complaint, a big price tag, but it's also my only one. And why? Gas prices.
Regardless of what anyone says, though, those are still some damned expensive fonts, particularly to someone who can't just bill it to a client. There are a lot of other gadgets and things I'd rather drop that much or far more on. Not Blue Light Special expensive, but dagnabbit... there's a War on. Font rationing, tout de suite!
I dunno I actually made a set of phonetic fonts from scratch because there was nothing suitable for the uses I needed, that didn't have a scarily prohibitive EUL and/or price tag. It's not that hard really, however like most new things there is a period of roadage required to iron out any quirks and kinks.
Also I often find that the kerning and hints supplied with any font need hand tweaking.
As to this particular style I personally think the move away from looped complicated lettering was the best thing about the turn of the last century. So I dislike this font style and probably wouldn't consider it unless requested to use it.
Fonts notoriously have absurd licensing agreements, and sadly these aren't any different.
Although the kitsch and cute application these might have aren't limited, they seem more likely to be butchered than treated delicately and respectfully (as heavily styled type should be).
Which leads me to agree with Mirrormonkey: give 'em Helvetica and nothing else.
For two of the three years in my typography class that's all we were allowed. Once you can make Helvetica behave, you can rule the world through type.
@1
http://bancomicsans.com/
Takeshi: I'm right there with you; I know WHY their fonts are so spendy, but it doesn't make it any less painful to drop $160 on what amounts to three lettering styles that I'll drop in my bin of several hundred other fonts. Especially House fonts, which are brilliantly put together but often so kitchy that I'd probably find myself pushing a corny 50's sign-lettering style on all my clients for a few months to justify the price.
House has raised their prices quite a bit recently, and from the language on their website, it sounds like they're inflating their prices to compensate for font piracy. Which, ironically, at $160 per pack, will probably get a bit worse.
i use fonts on a regular, professional basis. i have no problem with price - yes they're expensive, but you get what you pay for. well designed and engineered fonts are good - and cheap or free fonts are usually substandard - in ways too arcane to detail here.
the real problem with House and several other hot foundries are the increasingly restrictive EULAs. imo, it borders on extortionate. no tool maker should be able to tell me what i can and can't do with their product. i'd rather pay a high price and know that it's mine to use for whatever.
restrictive EULAs are impractical, inconvenient, and they invite violation. for many small users they virtually require it. i know this thru much discussion with many designers who buy/license fonts legitimately but cannot practically conform to the more restrictive EULAs. it's the same old paranoid "make a criminal out of a legitimate user" scenario. it will inevitably backfire. BoingBoing should not be promoting these fonts, or at the very least BB should be exposing the EULA problem.
there are still plenty of great foundries out there with less restrictive EULAs, but the trend is grim. i do read (and conform to) them as part of my job. House is one of the worst. and yes, the attitude in their FAQ stinks too.
Woah... just read the FAQ. This does not apply.
For a company that has really distilled down an essence of communication, they really jumped the shark with that one.
I can appreciate their disdain for company's hesitance in paying appropriate licensing, but as many have pointed out their EULA make clear invites to the user to violate it. Putting language like that on your company's website is poor form, and a bit of a fuck-you to everyone they mention (companies, small designers, students - their entire customer base).
I actually wish that I was a pro designer, so I could feel a little bit better about purchasing this set. As it is, I'll probably just use them to decorate my website a little.
They remind me of being a kid. Unlike some, I miss the days of hand-lettered signs. I worked at a grocery store as a freshman in high school, and I always marveled at the produce manager's penmanship. He wasn't terribly bright about a lot of things, including produce, but he sure knew how to use a marker.
And also Mr. Seidensticker, God rest his soul. That guy could sell an overpriced pair of blue jeans, let me tell you.
It's a gargantuan undertaking to make a complete set of characters all appear to be of the same family and have not a single one stick out as an ugly duckling which will never become the proverbial swan.
Kitsch fonts have their place, and to say that they can be created with a flick of the wrist of an experienced wacom tablet user is naïve.
As for the price, think about the time it would take to develop hand-lettering techniques with brushes, different lettering styles and practicing them, then the actual production of the hand lettering for a single job. Then factor in wording changes by the client and $160 becomes a pretty good price for a flexible set of type all perfectly in-character which you can use over and over again.
Type design is a bit of an invisible art. It gives tone to statements, readability to volumes of text, legibility to important signage. I think the price you pay for a font of excellent design is well worth it's price.
Also, check out my friend Kris Sowersby's typefaces. http://www.klim.co.nz
I realize fully that not every kid who lives in Peoria and got a Wacom tablet for Christmas is in the same league as the artist who created these. But some of them are bound to be.
I was being snarky for the heck of it.
Saying "any infant with a Wacom tablet could create these" is roughly the same as saying "any photographer could make Dr. Strangelove." But you know what? It's still true. Anyone who harnesses one tenth of their creative potential can produce work every bit as good as this.
That's not to say that it's an easy thing to do. Nevertheless, what I said was absurd on its face; not naïve. It is significantly more naïve to assume that I really believe that a developmentally disabled monkey could create a set of fonts. Also, I'm not being sarcastic when I say that they're still overpriced. With instantaneous replication of a given product, scarcity doesn't apply to fonts and software.
Oh, and thanks for the link. I disagree with you that a font that expensive is "worth" what is charged. No matter how many lines you fed me, I would still see it in relation to the amount of diamonds De Beers has dumped into the ocean.
The amount of blood shed over oil, with oil companies turning record profits. Children beaten with canes, working for pennies a day making sneakers. To me, there are a lot better things to spend $160 on, but it doesn't mean much. I'll still buy fonts.
Don't try to convince me that they're really "worth" anything, though.
Anyone heard about Italian Vogue's 'black' issue?
It's making shockwaves in the English speaking fashion industry. So much so they're shunting all the unsold copies form Europe over to the UK and the US where unscrupulous news vendors are adding a surcharges to the cover price.
I mention it here because people are paying $20 or more over the cover price to buy it. I wouldn't, but then I'm sure the art director didn't chose to use ethnic models due to a meaningful statement about anything.
Value for intellectual property is intangible, but fonts, software? If it's being sold as a product, and can have infinite copies made of itself, somehow it's exempt from supply and demand issues?
Or worse you don't actually buy it, you're expected to rent it.
i know this idea is popular here: that if it's reproduceable it somehow has no monetary value - the whole "no such thing as intellectual property" riff... not sure i agree, not really qualified to comment, except it seems absurd on the face of it, one of chris anderson's pipedreams. as a designer myself, i understand that the real value is in the laborious creating. real people put real years into designing really complex fonts.
of course it has value, otherwise you wouldn't want it !
"value" is a red herring here. the real offense is the license. not the assignment of value but the attachment of usage limitations or more specifically the attachment of greater value to certain usage.
"if you do a more expensive project with our tools, we want more money for the license." that seems extortionate to me, the definition being: oppressive exaction. if it took that much work, just make it expensive and then get out of my business, which is working with it after i bought it.
Agreed, yet "value" itself is intrinsically problematic. As a general rule, nothing is worth what you end up paying for it. Not a damned thing.
Nor do I believe that the amount of labor that goes into the creation of something reproducable is proportionate to the amount charged... not usually, anyway. Basically never. Now, true, if they only sold one set of fonts, I would say that it couldn't possibly cover the labor that went into it, but that's clearly not going to be the case. I never suggested that reproducable items such as fonts have no monetary value, but instead that their values are inflated according to whatever prestige (or illusion of prestige) the product offers. The difference between Walgreen's brand body spray and Chanel no. 5, in a nutshell.
I agree with intellectual property rights, and even EULAs if the creators deem them necessary. If fonts themselves were a need, we would have more of a right to get upset, but they're not. They're strictly a want, even for professional designers. Because someone worked on them, it makes for a compelling argument that they would be worth something, but that worth is hardly dictated exclusively by the efforts afforded its creation. Otherwise, the price should decrease following the very first purchase.
I'm not advocating that everything should be free.
What I am saying is firstly; we are moving towards an acceptance of limitations on things we pay money for to the point that we actually no longer own anything.
Imagine going to your local supermarket and being given an EUL for all the products you buy. You have to eat this personally, can't share it with anyone blah blah blah. Laughable right?
My second point is slightly more complex and open to misinterpretation so continuing with the supermarket analogy - rearing chicken takes around 39 days from egg to slaughter house. Free range chicken is more expensive than chicken coming from intensive farming production, the numbers produced make the free range chicken rarer, compounded with the higher amount if man hours required per chicken to rear one using free range methods.
Like wise if I buy a whole chicken it costs less than if I buy it in pieces, the extra cost of individually wrapping plus the time of the skilled employee that took the chicken apart.
However the overall cost of buying chicken has gone down considerably over the past 40 years as the numbers of chickens in existence has gone up.
Now imagine someone invents a machine that can, in a matter of seconds, make an identical copy of a mature, ready for slaughter chicken out of nothing more than electrons. Logic dictates that the chicken farmers would save a lot of money on their production overheads and that saving would be passed on to consumers.
Now can I search and replace 'chicken for 'software' or 'fonts'? No I can't.
Lets explore this weird angle of reality for a moment - the products are not scarce, they are in fact infinite, yet their price doesn't lower. We also can't touch them physically and therefor transcend the need for packaging, yet in most cases the product downloaded directly onto my computer costs the same as the boxed version with manual. The products transcend the need for spending on traditional broadcast advertising, they have the internet, yet that saving too isn't passed on to the customer.
In reality what your dealing with is the Ricky Martin factor, something the purveyors know has a shelf life which depends on fickle screaming teenagers with attention span problems wanting it. While his 15 minutes are ticking Ricky's handlers milk the teenies for whatever they can, because once his time's up nobody will want him, not even for free, until he becomes retro cool in 20 years or so.
To the people mentioning the work going into the creation of fonts. Salary structures in IT blinker people into not looking beyond launch deadlines and hourly totals - the development time doesn't just evaporate once the job is completed, it's just not perceived of as having a value until you start calling it experience.
i'm not sure where you're going with the chickens and ricky martin, but myth #1 in the IP debate is the notion that value is determined exclusively by scarcity.
quality, desirability, perception, usefulness, and specialization all contribute to "value" and perceived value in ways that extend beyond mere availability.
there are countless examples of things that are numerously available but remain relatively expensive in large part due to the quality of workmanship. most examples may be material, but some are less tangible, including many examples in which the quality of work is the result of the time, effort, training, and experience of the vendor.
like i said before: i'm not opposed to the initial expense; the value is real, and i want to pay the toolmaker for the tool, but attaching user-profit-based usage fees to the product is utterly bogus, opportunistic, and inappropriate.
as far as the chickens and Ricky Martin are concerned - chicken gets cheaper the more we produce, Ricky gets exponentially expensive as long as his fad is fresh on the market.
Myth number 2 in the IP market is that value software products are expensive.
It is so because people expect it to be expensive, coming from an industry that was in living memory only affordable by countries and huge businesses. In other words it is widely perceived as being expensive regardless of the quality of the item.
Jewellery is a good example, people who buy jewellery have to insure it and mistake the insurance value for the true value of the item. In fact the insurance value is much higher than the true value, as it is intended to buy missing items no matter what the cost. But it adds to the perception that jewellery is supposed to be expensive. Something that most retail jewellers are more than happy happy not to point out. One that did, the UKs Gerald Ratner, had a vast empire whipped out from under him by customer backlash for plain talking about his company's products true value.
http://www.businesszone.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=173378&d=1095&h=1097&f=1096&dateformat=%25o%20%25B%20%25Y
In reality if you are buying from a large chain of jewellery stores, you are buying the result of mass production, this lack of rarity lowers the value of the item, along with other factors like workmanship (read man hours and experience employed) and quality of materials. Damien Hurst's recent diamond studded skull illustrates this. It has an entirely arbitrary price - Hirst didn't cut the diamonds himself, and he didn't make innovative or skilful mounts for them. The cost of making the skull then falls to the raw materials: amount of bling stuck on the outside, the cost of the skull itself and the man hours for sticking them together, and the name it carries.
Compare the skull to something like a Faberge egg, also using a 'found' component. Whether it's to your taste or not the workmanship is impressive.
Most software is not 'bespoke', it is mass produced. Like Hirst's skull, it is made from
'found' items - pieces of older projects, often referred to as modules or libraries in programming circles. Fonts are no different - they are made to be sold en-masse and they are all derivative of something else. I'm sure the creators of the font didn't have a mystical insight that created the concept of letters that look like they were painted by a brush, because I've seen fonts like it before. I also bet the font foundry didn't pay the creators of the style, the original artisans. whose examples were used for reference material for copying their fonts, something they themselves are quite strict about. So if it's not originality of concept or rarity what is it your left paying for? The kerning and the hints? The name of the font foundry? Cue Hirst and his glue tube.
@33-a_user:
i get your general point, but there are reductive assumptions in your "description" of both software dev and font dev. i can't comment much on software, but i know what goes into a good font and, even with older designs inspiring new ones, the level of expertise and labor separating the good from the bad is profound and not entirely invisible to the user. i know font makers who have spent years on fonts, only one or two at a time, whose livelihood depends on an increasingly obsolete business model with no clear replacement in sight.
the long tail ? 1000 true fans ? i don't think so.
there's a level of artistry in fonts which make them an odd hybrid between pure software and pure visual design. font vendors are both exploiting and frustrated by this odd status.
meanwhile, value is calculated not so much by scarcity as by quality, and the licensing scam continues.