Ethan Dun­ham

I have been design­ing fonts since 1995 under Font­head Design. I’ve always enjoyed cre­at­ing dis­play faces and recently star­ted get­ting into dis­trib­ut­ing them as well.

To be hon­est, the idea ini­tially came to me as a way to make a little side income (advert­ising, affil­i­ate). But I quickly real­ized how much I wanted to have this resource myself, to use in my own pro­jects. The ini­tial inspir­a­tion came from the book „Free Font Index 1″ which had just been pub­lished. The author had col­lec­ted what he thought were good examples of free fonts. I wanted to do the same thing, but make sure that the licenses allowed com­mer­cial use. I was put-off by all the font authors releas­ing their fonts as non-commercial only. I really wanted to have qual­ity over quant­ity. So the col­lec­tion is what I think are reas­on­ably useful fonts.

Not at all. In fact I think that is a great mar­ket­ing tool for a very crowded space. I wished more foundries did this.

This was NOT planned from the begin­ning. It happened nat­ur­ally as more and more browsers became cap­able. I real­ized that it would be a great resource for web designers.

Font-face tech­no­logy is both simple and com­plex. The idea is simple. You send a font with a web page to have it rendered in that font. The prob­lem lies in what the browser accepts as a legit­im­ate font and also in the integ­rity of the font itself.

I cre­ated it after read­ing a blog post from Jonathan Snook. I knew of the tools to cre­ate these files and thought it would be a help­ful addi­tion. And obvi­ously I like a chal­lenge and thought it would be fun. I like keep­ing it free as it cre­ates good­will. I’ve thought about cre­at­ing a „Pro“ ver­sion, but that will likely not hap­pen any­time soon.

There are many pieces that all work together. The „con­ductor“ so to speak is PHP. It sends com­mands to Font­Forge scripts, Perl scripts, and other bin­ar­ies, like ttf2eot and sfnt2woff.

I don’t know how the auto hint­ing engine works. I set up some para­met­ers, prep the font and tell it to go! :-) It is crit­ic­ally import­ant right now to Win­dows users, as the ren­der­ing engine on that plat­form requires hints to render fonts well. The Mac plat­form ignores hint­ing and the grid­fit­ting is all done by the rasterizer.

Font­s­pring is a font dis­trib­ut­or­ship with a focus on deliv­er­ing web­fonts as well as desktop fonts. It uses the same code as our Font Squir­rel Gen­er­ator to con­vert foundries‘ OTF fonts into web­fonts. We aim to have as large a lib­rary as pos­sible of fonts licensed for web use. I didn’t want to offer any­thing sub­scrip­tion based. I feel that many design­ers would rather have the con­trol over their fonts than have to deal with a third party.

No, I think that there will always be a place for Font Squir­rel. Free never goes out of style.

Per­haps. But we oper­ate on the prin­ciple that most people are hon­est. We provide the tools and assume that hon­est people will be care­ful to sup­port the design­ers who make fonts. I real­ize that it doesn’t always work that way. But why shouldn’t hon­est users have access to tool that make their lives easier?

Because it seems like com­mon sense. Fonts have never been subscription-based in the past. Why should they be now that they are on the web? Nobody wants to sell web­fonts and so that seemed like a great oppor­tun­ity for us. Our 60+ foundries agree.

You buy it once and then use it over and over. It becomes like royalty-free stock pho­to­graphy that you pur­chase. It gives the designer free­dom without hav­ing to worry about licens­ing, annual fees and hav­ing crit­ical assets hos­ted by a third party.

Most of the foundries I ask are enthu­si­astic about it. It relieves them from the bur­den of hav­ing to provide the fonts for the web, and gives them another mar­ket to sell to. Some foundries come to me, ask­ing to join for the pur­pose. Yes, there are some who do not want their fonts on the web at all, or think that some­how their fonts are safer being dis­trib­uted by a third-party sub­scrip­tion ser­vice. (They are not safer.)

Fonts on the web have a long way to go before they are easy and work as expec­ted. We want to help design­ers and foundries keep up with things.