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From Moleskine to Market

ilovetypography.com

39 pointsgnosis10 comments

Ironically, I found the typeography of the main article so hard to read I had to use Readibility. The main font appears to be one of these two:

http://typekit.com/colophons/vcb6rkj

The combination of font and size chosen is an exceedingly poor match for 96dpi web rendering.

It's Le Monde Courrier STD.

Wow I sort of felt bad thinking the same thing but the first thing I noticed on the page were the words "I love typography" and the second thing was how difficult the article was to read.

My version of Chrome on Windows (4.0.249.43) isn't rendering some of the characters at all.

The font rendering varies wildly between browsers: http://i47.tinypic.com/1125ssp.png

From left to right: Firefox (Win), Chrome (Win), Safari (Win), Safari (Mac)

Firefox renders the font way too light, Chrome (this version at least) falls back to a default font, and Safari on Windows uses incorrect kerning and renders the some characters too narrow. Only Safari on Mac renders the font acceptably (except from the heavy diagonal on the capital N and the oversized apostrophe, maybe).

Another data point for you, Opera on Gentoo Linux:

http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/4621/1231150731.png

To me it looks pretty similar to your Firefox screenshot.

That isn't using the right font either. The 'e' is all wrong.

As I understand it, Mac doesn't use 96dpi as its logical mapping, but rather 72. The kerning in Firefox (Win) isn't great either.

Does anyone know how the economics of font creation work out?

This seems to take an enormous amount of time to create [what appears to me to be] a very niche product that sells for only $250.

It is terrible. An old girlfriend worked as a type designer and rampant piracy makes selling fonts to end users a terrible business.

These "Type Foundries" make their main revenues by designing custom fonts for magazines where you can earn 5-6 figure sums. e.g. Martha Stewart may want a custom script font family for her magazines. She'll turn to a company to design a font exclusively for her. They also make money when selling large bundles of licenses to media companies that tend not to pirate fonts. Much the same way Adobe sells lots of software to institutions, but suffers piracy among hobbyists. Except there are thousands of font options, many of which are free.

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