Monotype Subscription

Graphic Design
#1

Just FYI. My monotype subscription has come up fore renewal. Last year, I was told by one the support staff that I could send PDFs to print. Now things have changed slightly and it seems you can prototype and mock up to your heart’s content, but if you want to put anything into production (and that included embedding or even outlining) in a pdf, then you can only include 10 fonts (not families) a year. another £200+ a year for 15 more.

I may just let it lapse and use Adobe and my existing font library going forward. Not decided yet, but the subscription comes to £238 (last year it was £105 and I could print). Seems steep just to mock up and Adobe’s library seems to be getting more and more comprehensive.

#2

I hope more people do what you do.
It seems a very strange business strategy to limit the purchase and use of fonts to 10 per year in the graphic design industry.

And fonts are totally useless if you can’t output them. We have been running into licenses that don’t allow outlining. I’m not sure the people who design fonts under that type of license understand how sign software, lasers and other modes of 3D output work. On the one occasion I chased one down, the license fee was pretty steep. It was a freeware font with a commercial use license and an outlining fee on top of that. We pointed this out in our job proposal. The designer wasn’t even aware of the commercial license, let alone the outline fee.

I don’t believe fonts should be free. Not at all.
But I wish there was a better system in place, for designers and print vendors.

#3

I’ve never heard of such a thing.
The most I’ve ever run into is Illustrator not allowing embedding in a PDF for one specific font. Everything else has worked fine as-is, and I know our license tracking is… lackluster at best, despite explaining the need for better font & license management to those with the power to implement a change.

Nobody seems to care as long as things keep chugging along.

#4

The license was along the line of, “You can’t use this font to create 3 dimensional objects for resale.”
I wish I had a better bookmark system. I’m sure it’s in there but can’t find it at the moment (or it could have been lost on migration to this new computer.)

#5

I would go with this route. If you ever find yourself on a job in which you cannot find an Adobe font that is suitable, that is when you can seek separate fonts and charge accordingly.

#6

This thread summarizes why I no longer design typefaces and fonts with the intention of making any money from them. Twenty years ago, it was a different story.

#7

It is a shame that it has come to this.

I have a few fonts I have been working on for years and at one point thought it might be a revenue stream. Now. Nope. Passion projects.

It is a double-edged sword though. With my graphic designer hat on, I like the freedom to be able to work with different fonts, but it’s pointless if you can’t actually use them. From the type designer’s perspective, it means income drops further and further.

Monotype do alright out of it though!

#8

Monotype has been buying up many of its competitor foundries. Recently, they’ve been consolidating many of their acquisitions under a common distribution and licensing platform. They’ve restructured their foundry partner agreements to favor Monotype.

Several years ago, font royalties from distributors were often 80% of the sale. Monotype led the way in reducing that to a 50-50 split, which has become the norm everywhere. Adobe Fonts is the exception. Adobe has an arcane formula for sharing revenue with its partner foundries, but it favors Adobe over the type designers. Of course, Adobe can do as it pleases since they have the built-in advantage of offering their font library as a built-in feature of their ubiquitous software.

Monotype always gives the fonts they own the highest visibility, which makes sense for them since they don’t need to pay royalties.

MyFonts (another Monotype property) currently contains around 270,000 fonts. A type designer could design a fantastic new font family, but nobody will ever see it since it will be lost in the clutter.

There are no good ways for an independent foundry (like me) to advertise their typefaces. The target audience is other designers. However, reaching the right people in ways that target type buyers would cost more than one could ever hope to make from the fonts unless the foundry is large enough to advertise its extensive collection rather than individual typeface families. When that’s the case, Monotype sees them as a competitor and tries to buy them out.

CreativePro recently bought out FontSpring, which was one of my favorite distributors. One year, I made about $25,000 on FontSpring alone, but since CreativePro bought them, I’m making little more than pocket change.

Let’s not forget Google fonts, either. The font families they select for distribution are getting pretty good, and they’re all open-source and free to use.

There are also hundreds of thousands of free and pirated fonts on the free font sites. Most are junk fonts, but many downloaders don’t care — they download them for a one-off purpose and have no use for them afterward.

Add what AI might soon do to enable font creation, and the future doesn’t look good for type design.