Comment by gkoberger
1 day ago
No, I'm saying a Michelin chef can complain about a 50x increase in the cost of truffles without negating the fact that a lot of people happily survive on ramen.
1 day ago
No, I'm saying a Michelin chef can complain about a 50x increase in the cost of truffles without negating the fact that a lot of people happily survive on ramen.
op isn't saying you shouldn't complain. op is saying you shouldn't steal instead of complaining
I think there's some confusion in who is responding to whom, then. I never said anything about piracy, but the person responding to me may have confused me with the top-level comment.
All I have done is defend the importance of typography, and never mentioned piracy or stealing.
Typography is important. So important that we have really good looking fonts available for free. And a custom font isn’t going to be the deciding factor in whether your next AI powered social graph app sinks or floats. Guaranteed.
9 replies →
No, those things aren't comparable. Truffles have a functional role in a dish. A typeface does not have a meaningful functional role in a document, compared to the high-quality freely-available alternatives. This is like complaining about some kind of specially-carved or dyed truffle.
I respect you a ton (genuinely, I think you're the most interesting writer in the tech space), but you have a profound misunderstanding of the importance of typography if you think the only reason you'd need a paid typeface is the same reason you'd need a Hermes bag. I know you're a curious person, so hopefully you take this as an opportunity to open your horizons on the importance of it.
I'm a typeface nerd. Bringhurst is one of 3 books on the end-table next to me right now. I spend a stupid amount of money for Hoefler fonts for my dumb blog.
This to me is like the Menswear Guy on Twitter, who will explain in very great detail to you why the Hermès product is significantly better than the generic alternative. He's right, but he also understands that you buy the Hermès product to make a statement. Spend money on that statement if you want --- I do --- but don't try to pretend you have a right to it.
(i don't mean i own any hermes products; just stupidly expensive typefaces)
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Typefaces do have functional roles, they {exude} a point in culture and time (the fonts that HN supports certainly time-stamps it).
edit: HN won't allow Fraktur[1] characters, even though they are in the unicode standard. Yet more evidence that font matters for the tone of the message you deliver.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur
The truffle, and the font, add _essence_
> A typeface does not have a meaningful functional role in a document
100% incorrect. There are fonts that are made specifically to increase legibility for a dyslexic audience. If that's not a functional role than I don't know what is.
One dyslexia font was tested and found to have the same legibility as normal fonts:
"Dyslexie font neither benefits nor impedes the reading process of children with and without dyslexia."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11881-017-0154-6
I'm skeptical that any of these fonts actually make a difference. (Although if you like Comic Sans, you might as well continue using it; it doesn't do any harm.)
Oh for God's sake. You also can't set an instruction manual entirely in DIN Grindel Milk. The implied subtext was the functional equivalence of free and unfree display fonts. The most popular dyslexia font in the world is free.
2 replies →
> Truffles have a functional role in a dish
Cheap "truffle oil" can fill that role as much as a free font can fill the role of a premium one. The real truffle and the premium font have a functional role for the few people who can tell either apart. For the rest maybe anything works, just put something on the plate or screen.
Not without adding fat
A high price in a font won't sink a business as a high price in truffle would for a Michelin chef... The price of a font for a business is extremely negligible... Or again you shouldn't buy it if your business is too small. And if it's that small you should be able to justify the value added by buying that font as truffle does for the chef.
So we are back at what OP said.
Well the analogy falls apart because (among many, many other reasons) the people eating at Michelin rated restaurants, especially 3-star, are completely insensitive to the price. It will cost whatever it costs and there will still be a long wait to get a table, if you even can.
So rather than pretending we're talking about truffles, let's just talk about fonts directly without strained analogies. Fonts, which the majority of people don't even recognize. 90% of people don't even know what a foundry is. Your average person can't tell the difference between any two fonts if they're both sans-serif or serif.
It doesn't fall apart, you have examples that actually match it. Marketing boutiques of website creators match the 3-star Michelin analogy. High budgets from their customers (think LVMH) are the norm. And they will love and understand paying X for a font. In fact they will almost expect this type of thing in the design process.
At the end of the day if people don't see the difference and the value between a free and a priced one, then they don't need to steal and can just use the free ones. There are plenty of amazing free fonts anyway some being the actual roots of many paying ones, and the gold standards.
Maybe it won't sink the business, but prices were bad enough for IBM to cough up the money to grow their own truffles (of IBM Plex variety).
Where’s the car in this analogy?
How would you get away with the stolen truffles?