Web fonts, open source, and industry disruption

If there was any lingering doubt that open fonts are causing an irreversible upheaval in the graphic design and typographic industries, one needs look no further than the ATypI 2013 conference in Amsterdam to dispel the idea. Within the type community, the availability of open fonts has been a serious point of disagreement for years, with critics espousing complaints that will sound familiar to those in the free software world. For example: open-licensed fonts will put professionals out of work, quality will plummet, and companies that use open fonts in their products are exploiting naive developers who do not know the value of their output. These critiques were heard in the 2013 conference, but a series of presentations would indicate that the tide is turning—albeit slowly—toward acceptance.

The rarely-discussed complication in assessing the rise of the open font movement is that there are actually two simultaneous shifts taking place: the increasing availability of open fonts and the increasing use of web fonts delivered to browsers using HTTP and CSS. The shifts overlap frequently, but they are not inseparable: services like Adobe TypeKit are happy to serve proprietary fonts for web pages, and open fonts can easily be used in print and offline documents. Put them together, however, and one has a system of delivering fonts that has nothing to do with the type industry as it has existed for the past three decades or so. Such changes are inevitable over time, but there is still a lot of disagreement about how they are implemented, as well as how much is being gained or lost.

There were actually two panel discussions at ATypI 2013 dedicated to open fonts. The first was moderated by Thomas Phinney from Extensis, and was humorously titled "Free fonts: threat or menace?" The second was moderated by Victor Gaultney of SIL International—co-author of the Open Font License (OFL)—and was intended to address how open fonts allow for collaborative work. This topic was overshadowed in the second panel session, however, by many of the same criticisms voiced in the first. The fundamental point of contention is whether or not open fonts constitute a net gain or a net loss for type designers—where the gain or loss is most frequently measured first in financial terms, and secondarily by the overall quality level of the world's typography. Both panels touched on these issues.

The biggest target is Google Fonts, which is by far the largest purveyor of web fonts, and which exclusively serves fonts under open licenses. In the first panel session, Phinney took the position that Google Fonts has done a poor job at quality control—incorporating fonts that are not simply of mediocre aesthetic quality, but also suffer from serious technical drawbacks like irregular letter spacing. As the most public face of the web-font revolution, the analysis goes, Google ought to do a better job weeding out low-quality material.

The counterargument is that Google Fonts is intentionally casting a wide net; making a large variety of resources available to users without attempting to act as a "gatekeeper" on matters of taste—to many, the traditional gatekeepers of typographic taste are seen as out-of-date regarding the needs of the web and other new technology, if not outright elitist. David Kuettel, manager of the Google Fonts service, described this as a data-driven approach. On the first day of the conference, he presented a new report about web font usage based on the company's analysis of the top one million web sites (by Alexa ranking). The results show a phenomenal increase in the use of web fonts: more than 35% of the top million sites use web fonts, and 62% of the top 100 sites.

The total usage numbers are hard to comprehend: the most-watched video on YouTube (Gangnam Style) has 1.7 billion hits, while the most-used web font (Open Sans) has 139.5 billion. By comparing pages with Internet Archive's Wayback machine, the analysis showed that it is clear web fonts are rapidly supplanting Flash and images as the preferred way to deliver custom text to users.

A surge in demand should be good news for typographers, of course—but there is a catch: the fonts served by Google Fonts offer no royalty payments to the type designer. The Google Fonts team's position is that it has played a primary role in kickstarting web-font usage—thus generating demand for other web-font services, even if (as Keuttel put it) Google has not yet figured out how to monetize web fonts. Keuttel said he believes the company will find a way to compensate web font designers, perhaps when it makes Google Fonts an option within its AdSense program.

The loudest critic (literally) of this position at ATypI was Bruno Maag of type foundry Dalton Maag, whom many will remember was commissioned to create the open Ubuntu Font. Maag vociferously criticized Google Fonts during the audience-question portion of the second panel, saying that Google was reported to pay a flat fee of $6500 for a font family; creating such a family required 400 hours of work, he said, so "how can Google expect someone to earn a living at $15 per hour." There was applause from many sections of the audience.

Keuttel responded by saying that Google Fonts is still in the process of growing from a "20 percent time" project into a full-fledged service, a process that has required his team to sell other Google product managers (such as Blogger, Google Docs, and now AdSense) on the value of integrating Google Fonts one at a time. He said that he thinks the service will figure out how to better compensate designers in the next few years, and that he also thinks Google services like AdSense will eventually be able to use commercial web font services, which allows for others to find their own pricing plans.

It is certainly disconcerting for anyone to hear "just wait five years and the money will sort itself out." Keuttel made a comment along those lines that was met with grumbling from the audience. But not everyone found Maag's protest compelling; some called his 400-hour number into serious question, while others denounced the wage-earning calculations as "a first world problem."

More interesting, however, were several comments about how business models have changed and will continue to change. Panelist Eben Sorkin, an ATypI board member with several open fonts published via Google Fonts, said that he has received requests for commissioned type design work through his open font releases. Furthermore, he said, the old model of selling licenses for digital fonts has basically meant that type designers sold only to professional graphic design studios—which is a very small audience. Web fonts may mean that the price of a license goes down, but they also make it possible to sell licenses to potentially everyone on the web.

Finally, Adam Twardoch (lead developer of the proprietary font editor FontLab) commented from the audience that open fonts provide yet another business opportunity, because anyone can be hired to improve or extend the product. With proprietary fonts, he said, if you ask the designer to create an additional weight and the designer says "I don't have time, ask me again in a few months" you are simply out of luck.

Sorkin and Twardoch's comments no doubt echo the experiences that other sectors of the open source software business have gone through in recent years. Business models change, but new ones do appear; they may prove most upsetting to established players, but eventually the majority of those players learn to adapt. Case in point: Adobe recently launched its Edge Web Fonts service, which offers a selection of open fonts from the Google Fonts service that Adobe type designers have enhanced and polished.

Phinney subsequently wrote a blog post with a more in-depth analysis of the open font and web font situation. It is an informative read, particularly with regard to the "quality gap" that Phinney reports in open fonts as compared to proprietary fonts. To a degree, of course, "quality" is in the eye of the beholder, and Phinney's post has spawned a lengthy and ongoing debate about that subject on the Open Font Library mailing list. For those interested in exploring the Google Fonts team's analysis of web font adoption, the data set is available on line (although anonymized for privacy reasons); Keuttel has posted a guide to getting started with it.

Regardless of where they predict the prices of font licenses to go or what they think of the predicted business models around open fonts, the majority of type designers at ATypI do seem to agree on one thing: for the first two decades of its existence, typography on the web was pretty terrible because it was limited to the so-called "web-safe fonts." That has now changed, considerably for the better, and wherever the industry heads now, open fonts will be part of it.