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If you really
want to understand why fonts cost money you must consider the time, work and
skillness needed to create a font. To create a high-quality font first you
have to study the history and development of types. You have to realize what
impact the totally different tools and social changes have had on the different
forms and how and why certain forms and combinations of letters have developed.
This knowledge is imperative to not only copy fonts but to really develop
them yourself. Apart from the historical knowledge you have to consider a
lot of optical details and know a lot about printing as well possible questions
are:
“How do you choose the size of a round form compared to the size of
a rectangular one?”
“How does the diameter of beams change in bends or slopes?”
“How do you avoid that tapering forms (e.g. the “w”) converge
when printed?”
And last but not least the font designer needs a strongly developed eye and a sense for the composition of forms as well as the certain know-how. When you compare the design of fonts with the design of one single logo of an enterprise the design of fonts is a highly complex task with numerous unknown quantities and parameters which have to be perfectly matched to lead to a satisfactory result. And naturally only very few designers are successful in this!
Apart from the
mental and creative effort when you first draft a font the production of a
font is very time-consuming and for people who don’t know a thing about
this difficult to understand. The development of a font often takes months
– the development of whole families can take several years!
Although the German alphabet consists of only 26 letters you need ca 220 characters
(numbers, special signs, semicolons, full stops "periods", commas
etc.) which all have to be designed by hand. The number of different signs
is of course multiplied by different options to use font like italics,
bold, CAPS etc. If you consider now how many hours you need
to design a single letter then you can at least estimate how long the development
of hundreds of signs takes you. Further you must carefully choose and define
the space for each single feature, the metric. Then you have to take into
account the so-called kerning: combinations of letters like e.g. “LT” have to be matched once again. These steps often take the same time
as the design of the letters. And still there is another step: it must be
possible later on that fonts can be shown really clearly on the screen so
you must program before how this should happen with small type-sizes. This
really large-scale and necessary procedure called hinting is important to
read a font easily on the screen, it suggests quality like the features metric
and kerning.
If you now take into consideration all the described details, the high-quality work, the uncountable hours or even months and years a user licence of e.g. €150 is definitely not too expensive. One single photo made by professionals cost the same – and doesn’t take hours or years…
To be able to
offer - despite all these facts – favourable license fonts it is necessary
not to invest too much time in developing details. So the fonts are offered
only with the usual symbols for the user. I have cut out unusual extra symbols
because they are not used very often, so fonts can be used quite promptly.
The fonts will be only extended if the customer explicitly orders specific
features like e.g. vowel mutations.
©2002
by Norfok® Incredible Font Design
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