TypeThursday: Andrej, thanks for being here for TypeThursday.

Andrej Krátky: Hello. It’s my pleasure. Thank you.

TT: So, let me first say I notice it’s been one year since you started Fontstand. And I know you’re one of the co-founders. Congratulations.

AK: Thank you.

TT: For the audience, I’m sure they’d be curious to know what’s your role with Fontstand?

Andrej’s Role in Fontstand

AK: We launched Fontstand on May 22nd, last year in Berlin after more than two years of development. Our team is very small with just a couple of developers, and we are two partners, with Peter Biľak. So most of the conceptual work has been done by the two of us with a great help from another fellow designer, Ondrej Jób, who we invited to design the user interface. Actually the roles are not really clearly split between me and Peter, but I would say that as things go, I am more involved with the technical part while Peter does a lot more of the foundry relations.

Both of us, we come from the perspective of type designers; although Peter is a much more prolific designer, of course. And he also runs a great type foundry. But we met on this project because we both have been thinking about the ways fonts are licensed and we came to a conclusion that it’s not only a question of licensing type and fonts, but also about new ways for the users to be able to discover fonts, with so many fonts available on the market.

TT: How does Fontstand achieve that?

We wanted to find a model that is beneficial for the creators of type and to help them find a sustainable economical model of their existence.

Fontstand’s Licensing Model

AK: Fontstand gives users the ability to test fonts for free and rent them for a limited time for an affordable price. Because we preselect fonts and foundries on Fonstand for quality, that makes it easier for users to find the best fonts possible. We’ve also focused on making the process to find those fonts very intuitive. It should be easy for the user to search, to try and test fonts.

TT: So to summarize what you’re saying, there were three main aspects of Fontstand you guys are attempting to solve.

One is preselection of quality typefaces by partnering with established and well-known foundries.

The second is a very intuitive and easy user experience via the user interface of Fontstand.

The third is a pricing model for the licensing of the typefaces that allows free trials and a rental model à la Netflix or something like that on a monthly basis that is, for upfront costs, lower than a traditional licensing model. Would that be a fair summarization?

AK: Yes, you are right. But at the same time it is important to stress that it is not only about the pricing, because the rental is a specific licensing method. And in my view, it’s very innovative in type distribution. You compared it to Netflix, which is a flat rate subscription-based model, and such services are already available for fonts. But they don’t make it easy to allocate the revenue to fonts and foundries at the end. We think Fontstand is much fairer to the type designers or independent foundries, because they get a fixed share of the price for each rental.

And that was another goal for us, to make the system work well for the foundries.

TT: So what you’re saying is the specific licensing model system for Fontstand, instead of Netflix where it’s a flat subscription and it’s very hard to distribute the funds in an equitable, fair way to the content providers. With Fontstand, the fee is directed to renting one typeface. Would that be fair to say as a summarization?

AK: Yes. Exactly. We wanted to find a model that is beneficial for the creators of type and to help them find a sustainable economical model of their existence. To make their work affordable without forcing them to discount heavily or give up on the fair share of their revenues.

We know that many of the foundries and type designers are quite conservative in the ways they are licensing their fonts, and I think it’s understandable.

TT: What are observations you could share with us based on the goals of Fontstand and being in business for the last year?

We have almost 12,000 registered users on Fontstand, and the number is growing all the time.

Fontstand’s Growth

AK: I think the initial goal to be able to put together a great collection of foundries and fonts worked very well for us. At this point, we already have, I think, 37 foundries in Fontstand. We started with 21 foundries. And we already have a number of foundries who wouldn’t hand their fonts to any other distribution channel but decided to offer them on Fontstand because they trust the model to be in favor of their policies.

TT: What about the type users?

AK: We have almost 12,000 registered users on Fontstand, and the number is growing all the time. The feedback from uses has been really good reactions. So we get a good feeling of what the users want, and we also start to understand better what are the possible pitfalls of the system. That’s one of the reasons we decided to work on the advanced font filtering, to make the search for fonts easier despite the growing number of fonts.

Font Search

TT: Based on the success of Fontstand going forward, I take it the recent features in Fontstand, specifically what you just referenced, advanced font filtering, is a response to Fontstand’s growing the popularity. Advance font filtering is to help make it easier to find typefaces for users. Would that be fair to say?

AK: Yes. That’s right. Although we have been trying to grow very carefully, there are several thousands of fonts from 800 families already available. That makes it not easy to select the right font for a job. The first step to make it easier was when we introduced live preview of custom text a few months ago. But we were continuously working on the advanced system of font filtering, and that is what we introduced recently.

Each foundry uses their own terminology or their own ways to sort the fonts. So we needed to find something universal and open for any future inclusion in the Fontstand library.

TT: When developing that advanced font filtering system, what was your process based on your perspective of deciding the organization of the content, the categorization of typefaces?

AK: We were trying to look around for a good categorization system, because we understood from the start that we cannot really count on foundries themselves to provide us with this data. Each foundry uses their own terminology or their own ways to sort the fonts. We needed to find something universal and open for any future inclusion in the Fontstand library.

TT: What was Fontstand’s solution to that?

AK: Because we didn’t find anything available, we partnered with Indra Kupferschmid, the professor of typography in Saarbrücken, who was working on these type categorization models before. And we asked her to develop a fresh new system for us, something that would really suit the needs of Fontstand. We had some ideas and we proposed the basic structure of how we think the filtering should be laid out. But she really came up with a very, very specific system. And so she really provided us with the knowledge that we needed to make this system work. There were lively discussions because we needed to find the right balance between the complexity of the system and ease of use for the user. It would be easily possible to make the number of criteria twice as large, but we really tried to skip everything that could not be used by the majority of users and keep only what is important, helping our system to remain simple and accessible.

We also kept the five main categories of typefaces as a first line of selection so for occasional users, who don’t need to go to the specific selection. But for more advanced or professional users, there is always this possibility to select very specific criteria of selection. And combined with our automatic tagging of other parameters, for instance the weights or languages, this really makes for a very powerful system, we believe.

TT: You shared that some aspects of the process were automatic. How does Fontstand’s system go through the fonts and make some categorization decisions based on that?

AK: For the formal categories, Indra herself has manually tagged all the typefaces available on Fontstand at this point. That was really a lot of work and we are very happy she could do it for us. And on the other hand we have this automatic data acquired from the font files, which include all available Open Type features or language scripts or weights, so there’s a combination of these two.

TT: This has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for your time here. I really appreciate it.

AK: Thank you.