This article outlines the data shared in the live online webinar presented about the survey results on January 30, 2020. You can also watch the video below!

About Me

I work for Monotype, managing foundry partners who sell their fonts with us and through our online websites. I’m passionate about helping type designers grow their businesses and improving processes to make doing business easier and faster. My daily work involves creative problem solving, being nice to people, and spreading the good word about fonts. I also research and speak about creative customers, the font industry, and design trends. Read more at www.marycatherine.design.

Overview

The 2019 Font Purchasing Habits Survey ran for 45 days and was available in 6 languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Japanese. The survey contained 82 questions, and those that made it to the end of the survey could download a pack of 15 Monotype fonts for free. As always, the survey results are released to the public to support the type industry.

Special thanks to Google Fonts, who sponsored the printing of the survey results booklet, printed by the lovely folks at Scout Books. Please email fontsurvey@myfonts.com to request a copy.

This year, over 21,000 people took the survey! I’m really proud of how the survey has grown over the past 4 years.

This chart shows where the survey respondents came from. This was tracked using UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) links.

Demographics

Selling Fonts

In addition to the general aesthetic quality of fonts, customers want three characteristics above all else: many styles in the family, good spacing & kerning, and lots of alternates & ligatures. This has changed very little over the past four years of the survey. This makes sense, these are essential parts of font creation. Less than 3% of users care if the font has won any awards. This has been consistently low-ranking over time. Finally, less than 22% of respondents say that the foundry who made the typeface is something they care about when evaluating fonts.

There are clear and specific ways customers want to shop for fonts:

User Feedback

49% of respondents say that user feedback (like ratings, reviews, Q&A, likes) is not helpful when evaluating a font. This is very different from selling physical products online, like clothing, where reviews are essential and generally standard. Think about the customer experience on Amazon, which is filled with a variety of user feedback. It is possible that showing the number of likes influences customers subliminally; unconsciously a more popular product with more likes may be more appealing. It’s comforting to know that many other people had a good experience with the product. This isn’t something that can be ascertained from a survey which relies on self-reporting.

Here are some more results related to buying fonts, and takeaways.

And some interesting stats about discounting and marketing….

Variable Fonts

A variable font is a single font file that allows the user to configure any number of desired font styles. This is a relatively old font technology that has seen a resurgence in the past few years within the type community. Some say this technology is the future of fonts. I’m interested to see what font users and buyers think.

39% of survey respondents have no idea what variable fonts are. This indicates that there is an opportunity for more customer education and awareness campaigns to help users understand what they are, how to use them, and how variable fonts can improve a customer’s workflow. Fonts are tools, after all, and for them to be successful, customers and users must see the benefits.

Unfortunately, this hasn’t changed much since I began asking this question three years ago. While there may be some slight variation in percentages, there hasn’t been any statistically significant changes over the past three years.

When you split the survey respondents into two groups — type designers and non type designers — the data tells a compelling story. Type designers are really excited about this technology, but it hasn’t spread to the greater design community yet. This indicates to me that much more outreach, education, and implementation must be done for this new technology to become viable for the general market. This indicates that there is an opportunity here.

Free Fonts

The idea of fonts as a free product is as important today as it was in the past. Most members of the general public don’t think about fonts. I love meeting new people, telling them what I do, and seeing the lights come on when they realize that fonts are a thing and are made by people. Then enlightenment turns into shock as people hear the large number of fonts released every day, and the money involved. If people know about fonts, they generally think of them as something that comes with something else. And this makes perfect sense. Fonts have historically just come with computers or software. You get a long list of fonts in Google docs, Word and Powerpoint, Adobe products, and Squarespace, to name a few. There is the perception that they are free.

I wanted to examine how often people are buying fonts. 38% buy fonts once every three months. For those who don’t buy fonts (only 6%!), a follow up question was asked to learn more about why. The results are below.

You can see that there are a variety of different reasons. 24% would like to pay for fonts but the price is usually too high. 23% say that it is too easy to find great free font options. Only 3% don’t see the value in paying for fonts.

And free fonts are a big deal. It’s compelling from a business standpoint to use something you don’t have to pay for. This is why 75% of survey respondents say that at some point in the past, for a new project, they decided not to purchase a font and used a free font instead. When it comes to existing projects, 55% say they have actively decided to switch from paid fonts to free fonts. These are big numbers!

The good news, at least for those of us in the font business, is that people do still see the need to buy fonts. And there are tons of reasons to spend money on fonts. People need unique designs, trends change, high-quality or recognizable fonts add legitimacy to brands. Fonts are a key part of brand consistency and brand recognition. The people who make innovative and quality fonts need and want to make a living, so it’s likely that they’ll continue to charge money for them. Fonts are just like shoes or cars, constantly evolving in design and functionality, but always necessary.

Foundry Loyalty

Earlier in this article, we saw that less than 22% of respondents said the foundry who designed the typeface is something they care about when purchasing fonts. Now we see that 47% say that there are foundries that are their go-tos for fonts, compared to 80% who say that there are websites or marketplaces that are their go-tos for fonts.

This means that, in general, there is less brand loyalty to foundries than marketplaces. This has many implications.

1. New foundries who create fonts that resonate with customers and/or tap into a current trend in design can have a good chance of success on a platform where their fonts can be discovered by font customers. This means the barrier to entry in the type industry is very low.
2. Existing foundries can’t rely on their brand name alone. There are very few foundry brands that are so strong that they impact actual font purchases. This isn’t to say that brands should be neglected, but it should be considered when determining where to spend time and money. For example, if you have a choice between spending time and money marketing your foundry brand vs. marketing a new font release, I’d recommend choosing the new font release.
3. Because the brands of font makers are less important to font customers (and the fact that there are so many fonts out there to choose from) fonts should be viewed as a commodity. This means that pricing is incredibly important.
4. When strategizing your font selling business, it’s important to think about the marketplaces you want to work with. Each marketplace (or website) has a different customer base, and in general, the strategy of working with as many marketplaces as possible generates the highest revenue. This is because a different set of potential customers will see your fonts at each marketplace they are available in.

Font Brands

This research also looks at font brands — both font makers and font sellers — to see how the market is changing over time. It’s also important to understand how our customers perceive these brands.

This image shows a comparison of the top 10 suppliers over the past three years. On average, each respondent shops for fonts at three different places (Mean 3.3, Median 3, Mode 3).

MyFonts is the most-used distributor each year. Some of you may see this and think back to the pie chart showing where all the survey responses came from, and how about half came through a channel connected to MyFonts. This occurred to me too. So, in order to make sure my data was solid, I did a statistical analysis where I created two groups — responses from MyFonts links and responses from non-MyFonts links. Normalizing the data, you can see that there are very few differences between these groups, and the few differences that do exist are not statistically significant. The difference in how the two respondent groups rate MyFonts is highlighted in yellow below. Both groups select MyFonts the most.

After survey takers selected the suppliers they’ve used in the past 12 months to buy fonts, then respondents were asked these three follow-up questions. Survey takers only evaluated the distributors they’ve used in the past 12 months.

You can see that MyFonts, Adobe Fonts, and Google Fonts consistently rate highly in trust and preference. However, for Overall Experience, we see smaller suppliers ranking very high, like Lost Type Co-op and House Industries, in addition to larger e-commerce websites. It’s important to note the diversity of brands here; people trust and like a variety of brands, everything from boutique to mass market. There is space for everyone in the type industry.

Brand Association

The question “Which word do you most associate with _____?” was asked for eight popular font brands, and all respondents were given the same bank of words to choose from (shown in a random order). These questions were shown to everyone, not just people who had used those brands in the past. The results are below.

And here is a condensed look at the top three responses for each brand for easy comparison:

Customer Persona: Creative Professional

There are so many responses in this data set that it’s possible to slice up the data into really specific segments to take a closer look at the different font user personas. I’ve begun with this one, and plan to dive into other persons in future research (stay tuned!).

A Creative Professional is defined as someone who works as a Creative Director, Art Director, Graphic Designer, Product Designer, in marketing, UX, or is a business owner. They work for companies or agencies, are not a type designer, has some kind of formal type or design education, and has an average to advanced knowledge of typography. Of the 21,000 survey responses, there were about 3,500 that fall in this persona. You can see their specific characteristics below.

If you segment this group further and split them out between company and agency, you also get some interesting results. A specific question was shown to people at companies, and a different question was shown to people who work at agencies.

If you’re selling fonts, it’s important to think about how your customers are purchasing fonts within the work environment they’re in. Someone at an agency is going to behave very differently from someone at a company. Getting to know your customers workflows is important. It’s not just the people actually designing with fonts who are out there buying fonts.

I plan on creating personas for more user categories in the future. What customer personas can you think of that you’d like to see more information on?

Perception of Type Designers

I work with lots of type designers, helping them to sell fonts. It’s important for me, and the people I support, to think from the customer’s perspective. I was curious to learn what customers actually think about type designers. I don’t think anyone’s ever asked before!

To recap — about 9% of survey respondents are type designers.

Last year, I asked if people personally know a type designer, as a yes/no question. This year, I wanted to dig deeper, and asked a multiple choice question to get more specific results. There is a broad spectrum of different ways people interact with type designers.

Next I asked seven questions which could be responded to on a scale of agree to disagree.

In general, people have had a positive experience with type designers.

Takeaways

With so much data, it’s sometimes hard to see the forest for the trees. I imagine, and I hope, that everyone’s takeaways here will be unique. Every one of you has a different relationship to fonts and the type industry. Take what you need, and I hope it helps!

Personally, my takeaways actually aren’t entirely related to fonts…

Think about your customer.

Whether you are in the font business or not, always consider your customer’s needs and experience. Your customer may not be the persona you assume. In the font world, it’s common and simple to assume your customer is a graphic designer using fonts in professional design software. However, the data shows that 42% of font customers are graphic designers — that means that 58% of customers are NOT graphic designers. What do you know about them?

Nothing is as simple as it seems.

There is always more to the story. Always. All of us have our own world-views. How could we not? We can only know what we know. But these views are too narrow, including mine. So, it’s important to not make assumptions, don’t follow the crowd, find out for yourself. Verify with data. Diversify your social circle. Do something (daily, if you can) to expand your worldview. As it relates to fonts, this means talking to font users, educating yourself about marketing, business, and the broader design industry.

Some things change.

The font world is tied to the corporate world more closely than one may assume. For example, in traditional font e-commerce, we see lower sales when people aren’t working (i.e. weekends, holidays) and more sales when people are at their desks. But the world is changing. Corporations are getting larger, more complex, and more international. Fonts are still an important part of branding and design, and becoming more and more important as companies struggle to achieve brand consistency. However, fonts as a software haven’t evolved to match the new world we live in. They’re still a file that can only be legally used with the proper license. From last year, subscription font use, open source font use, and using a font manager has increased. Font users have more complex needs than they used to, and are looking for a simple solution. As the world changes, we must too.

Some things stay the same.

For certain questions in the survey, not much has changed over the years. Users still prioritize the same font features — like overall design, pricing, kerning, spacing, ligatures, alternates. We know how to make fonts that will make customers happy. The main large font websites are still popular and resonating with customers. People still want to evaluate fonts the same way as they did four years ago. We know in general how customers want to shop. Variable fonts still haven’t caught on (yet). Sans Serifs still reign supreme. Desktop licenses are still the most popular. People are still spending money on fonts, and the overall font industry revenue is continuing to increase. There’s plenty of room for new foundries to join and succeed. Most importantly, people still love fonts!

Download the PDF slide deck here.

Results of the 2019 Font Purchasing Habits Survey was originally published in Font Stuff on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s back and better than ever!

The fourth annual Font Purchasing Habits Survey is here. There are new questions, a new pack of fonts you get for free for completing the survey, new sponsors, and the survey is now available in six languages!

The Font Purchasing Habits Survey is an anonymous survey for anyone who uses fonts. I’m collecting opinions to help foundries, type designers, and font distributors in our design community to better understand the people who need and love fonts! Because fonts are both tools and art, and licensed online rather than sold like traditional products, font makers and sellers face unique challenges. More information is needed to better support customers and users! Join one of the largest public font customer research efforts to shed more light on this under-studied topic.

Take the survey today! Deadline is October 11, 2019.

Survey contents

Now available in six languages!

Last year, over 15,000 people took the survey (compared to around 2600 in 2017!). To keep growing and reach a more international audience, the survey is now available in Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Brazilian Portugeuse in addition to English.

Measuring the font shopping experience.

This year, the survey features a new section of questions about customer’s experience on each font sales website. We’ll be able to see the most favored and trusted distributors out there!

How graphic designers feel about type designers.

The survey also now includes a new section about how graphic designers interact with and perceive type designers. It’s important for the members of the type industry to reach the users of type, so knowing how font users view font makers can help!

What’s up with variable fonts?

We’ll be asking the same question as the past two years about variable fonts to continue to measure font users and makers reaction to variable fonts.

Pulse statements

I’m asking people how much they agree or disagree with these statements:

• User guides included with a font purchase have helped me to utilize the features of a font.
• I would like to be able to change the font on my cell phone.
• I would pay more for fonts that are created by famous type designers.
• Discounted fonts are lower quality than fonts that are not discounted.
• I would like to be able to use fonts I’ve purchased in Google Docs.
• I think fonts can be sexy.
• and more!

In-depth look at people who don’t purchase fonts.

A new set of questions just for people who don’t spend money on fonts will help to understand font people’s behavior and font needs!

Free fonts

As a thank you for completing the survey, you’ll get 15 awesome Monotype fonts for free. See them here on MyFonts.

Thank you partners!

Special thanks to our amazing partners who support this research initiative: Extensis, Monotype, MyFonts, Google Fonts, Fonts.com, Fontspring, FontShop, Linotype, Glyphs App, Type Directors Club, and Bay State Design Shop.

All the results of the survey will be shared at the Type Directors Club in New York City and via live webcast. Date soon to be announced. The results will also be posted here on Medium. Don’t want to wait? Check out last year’s results and check out fontsurvey.com to stay up to date!

Font Feelings & Customer Segments

Welcome to Part 3 of 3 of the Font Purchasing Habits Survey Results. This content is so long that I’ve decided to split it up.

INDEX:

Part 1: Demographics & Distributors
Check out Part 1 to see the demographics of survey respondents, this year’s list of most popular font distributors, and how this list stacks up to site traffic data.

Part 2: Font Features, Evaluation, & Pricing
Part two contains information about the font features customers want, how customers evaluate fonts, and the prices they are willing to pay. Additionally, part two contains Likert scale questions and four new questions asked this year about licensing, budgeting, spending, and managing fonts!

Part 3: Font Feelings & Customer Segments
My new favorite section is all about font feelings. See part three for information about how customers and type designers feel about variable fonts, major font brands, and if fonts are still sexy. The presentation will wrap up with a dive into the customer journey and data-based customer segments.

To read the full presentation, click here.
You can download the PDF slides here.

What is the Font Purchasing Habits Survey?
The third annual Font Purchasing Habits Survey ran for 45 days from May 5 to June 20, 2018. I asked 56 questions related to font preferences and purchasing habits. Respondents who completed the survey received a pack of 15 fonts great Monotype fonts for free. The results of this anonymous survey were debuted in August at TypeCon2018 in Portland, Oregon. This article contains the talk and the original slides.

Font Feelings

This new section called ‘Font Feelings’ is my new favorite category. Here we’ll dive into how customers and type designers feel about variable fonts and major font brands.

For fun, I asked respondents if they think fonts can be sexy:

Variable Font Feelings

I asked the following question about variable last year too, so now we can compare answers year over year to see how variable font awareness and perception changes over time.

These 2018 results may seem very familiar to you if you read last year’s results; very little has changed since 2017.

Additionally, type designers still have very different responses than the rest of the population:

Additionally, I asked four Likert scale questions related to concepts behind or functions of variable fonts. I wanted to see if survey takers may have a need for variable fonts, even if they may not know what they are.

Font Company Feelings

There were five new questions this year to really dive into brand perception. I asked the following question about five major design brands related to fonts: Adobe, Monotype, MyFonts, Creative Market, and Google Fonts. The respondents were also shown the logo of each brand.

This word bank was carefully crafted to reduce value judgement. No overtly positive or negative ‘judgement’ words were used — there was no “good” and “bad”, “ugly” or “pretty”. Instead, the goal was to collect responses to form a more nuanced view of how users see each brand. You may also notice that there are some words with loose foils; monopoly vs. democratic, cutting-edge vs. historic, accessible vs. elite.

The Results:

I was also curious to see how type designers vs. the rest of the population perceive these brands. In general, type designers are using the words “monopoly” and “democratic” more than the rest of the population.

Customer Segments

I’ve had an idea for quite some time, and with this survey I now had data to be able to present and provide evidence for it.

Let’s look at the journey of the type customer. We can start by creating an x and y axis. Y is volume of customers. X is the monetary value that customer brings to the industry.

Customers get on this map by first discovering or consciously recognizing that fonts exist. Perhaps they discover different fonts they like from a drop down menu in Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Maybe they see something that is designed with a really illegible font and they have a negative reaction. Maybe they even see a meme or funny tweet about fonts. The first dot appears on our map:

At this point, there are many customers(font users), but they have no or little monetary value; they’re not spending money.

The next step is when those customers decide to download a free font — illegally or legally. They make the effort to go out and search, evaluate, download and install a font.

This dot is lower in volume, because not everyone who knows fonts exist will go out and download a font. But the value increases slightly because perhaps when they do this, they are seeing ads.

Next, something happens to cause the customers who download a free font to make the jump and purchase their first font. Perhaps they download lots of free fonts and their font education increases; they start to encounter technical or quality issues with free fonts and thus need a better solution. Perhaps they encounter a licensing issue and must buy the font to be compliant. Maybe they even get to a place where they have the budget to actually buy a font. Whatever the reason, they’re now in and providing real monetary value.

From here, customers will then move to purchasing fonts regularly.

The next step is needing different licenses.

Finally, the last step is for the customer to become someone who truly values type:

Perhaps they are commissioning custom type, buying very large licenses, or advocating for the considered use of fonts in their business as tools for success. These customers bring the most value, but these are the fewest.

Font subscription users fall along the path in the middle, for people who need to purchase fonts regularly or need different licenses.

Now this may be a nice theory. However, to really make this actionable and useful, we need to look at some data. We can do this by grouping users based on a survey question that maps perfectly to each of these steps:

In the following profiles, there are three primary questions that help to show how each customer group changes: their use of software with OpenType features, the categories of licenses they need, and their skill level. At the bottom of each panel is a grid of other factors that may produce interesting results and could be indicators for behavior.

Let’s dive into each customer group, starting with those who only download free fonts:

As you can see, 39% of these users don’t know if they have access to software with OpenType Features! These users need the most personal use licenses, and the skill levels are skewed towards the lower skill levels. The red blocks are the lowest percentages you’ll see, and the green blocks are the highest numbers you’ll see in the following profiles. This customer group has the highest percent of casual users, the most people who don’t know about variable fonts, and the most percent of people who agree that fonts are too expensive and font licensing is too confusing. This group has the fewest people who know a type designer, the fewest percentage of people who are a type designer, and the fewest percent of people who pay for a subscription music or video service.

With the group purchasing 1–10 fonts, we see that more people now have OpenType software, Desktop licenses become the primary license needed, and the skill level now becomes more normally distributed. The lowest figures are now increasing and the highest figures and now decreasing. For example, the percent of causal users dropped from 56% to 31%, and the number of people who pay for a video or music subscription increased from 59% to 73%.

For those that buy 11–25 fonts, OpenType use has increased, desktop license use has increased while personal license use has decreased, and the skill level is now skewing towards advanced.

Again, we see the same trends as in the previous profile continuing, with more people knowing they have and using OpenType, and the skill level skewing more to the right. Extended licenses use is increasing here too.

In this profile, we see extended licenses jump past webfont licenses. Skill level is high, OpenType use is high, and the fewest percent of people think font licensing is confusing, at only 19%.

Now we jump backwards and look at subscription users. This group has the most need for webfont licenses, and you can see that the skill level distribution has backed down to being more normally distributed, at intermediate and advanced. This group has the highest percent of people who pay for a music or video subscription, at 83%. The pie chart showing results to the question about OpenType use is now most similar to the results for the “11–25 fonts” group.

The goal is to take customers from discovering fonts exist to becoming people who value type.

But the problem is that this graph is going down, because there are so few people who value type. To make the group of people who value type increase in volume, there are a few things we can do.

1. Type Education

By ‘Type Education’ I don’t mean just traditional type education. If someone is going out searching to learn more about type, they’re going to find it. And it is important to ensure that there are good resources out there for those who want to learn more. What we also need to focus on is educating those who aren’t looking actively to be educated about fonts. Finding ways to educate users while they are browsing or shopping, or along the purchase path will generate impact.

2. Font Awareness

Font Awareness is very different from Type Education. Increasing font awareness will get more people into the first step of this diagram. There are so many people out there who become very interested in or curious about fonts once they discover on a conscious level that fonts exist. We can help the public connect the dots that fonts are made by humans, that fonts can be a valuable tool in business, that fonts are intellectual property, and that fonts are actually quite accessible.

3. User Experience

The final step to increasing the number of people who value type is providing a superb user experience. I’m not just talking about UX in the traditional sense, but instead holistically about the experiences of buying, managing, and using fonts. Accessible customer support, font management solutions that are delightful and effortless, and ways to make licensing more palatable are they keys here, because they are the biggest pain points.

Thank you for your time, and for making it to the end of this long article series! For more font research, follow me on twitter and here on Medium.

Mary Catherine Pflug is passionate about the type designers who make fonts and the graphic designers who use them. She leads the foundry team at MyFonts, managing 2,500+ foundry partners, and spearheads the Font Purchasing Habits Survey research initiative. She helps run TypeCon as the treasurer of the SOTA board and volunteer coordinator. She also sits on the city council of Bay State Design Shop, a community design organization in the New England area.

The 2018 Font Purchasing Habits Survey Results: Part 3/3 was originally published in Font Stuff on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Font Features, Evaluation, & Pricing

Welcome to Part 2 of 3 of the Font Purchasing Habits Survey Results. This content is so long that I’ve decided to split it up.

INDEX:

Part 1: Demographics & Distributors
Check out Part 1 to see the demographics of survey respondents, this year’s list of most popular font distributors, and how this list stacks up to site traffic data.

Part 2: Font Features, Evaluation, & Pricing
Part two contains information about the font features customers want, how customers evaluate fonts, and the prices they are willing to pay. Additionally, part two contains Likert scale questions and four new questions asked this year about licensing, budgeting, spending, and managing fonts!

Part 3: Font Feelings & Customer Segments
My new favorite section is all about font feelings. See part three for information about how customers and type designers feel about variable fonts, major font brands, and if fonts are still sexy. The presentation will wrap up with a dive into the customer journey and data-based customer segments.

To read the full presentation, click here.
You can download the PDF slides here.

What is the Font Purchasing Habits Survey?
The third annual Font Purchasing Habits Survey ran for 45 days from May 5 to June 20, 2018. I asked 56 questions related to font preferences and purchasing habits. Respondents who completed the survey received a pack of 15 fonts great Monotype fonts for free. The results of this anonymous survey were debuted in August at TypeCon2018 in Portland, Oregon. This article contains the talk and the original slides.

Font Features & Font Evaluation

There are two distinct but essential parts of the font purchase. The first is what features customers want when they download or buy a typeface. The second is how customers are evaluating fonts. The following two questions dive into these topics.

Font Features

The #1 thing font customers care about are the numbers of styles in a font family.

As you can see, 82% of customers say they care about the number of styles in the font family.

Font Evaluation

When asked about font evaluation, customers want to see the entire character set, type out their own words and phrases, see if the font has alternates and ligatures, and select and compare fonts with each other.

Here you can see a comparison to 2017.

New Questions!

This year, I added some new questions about font licensing, font budgeting, font spending, and managing fonts.

Likert Scale Statements

I showed survey-takers a series of statements, and asked them to respond on a scale of agree to disagree. Their answers can be converted to a scale of 1 to 5, with 3 being neutral.

You can see a few of the interesting results below, and any changes from 2017.

It is worth making a note about the bottom left statement “There are a few foundries that are my go-to for fonts. I check their fonts first to see if they have what I need before browsing.” The results of this statement may be misleading. I asked a follow up question to anyone who responded ‘agree’ or ‘somewhat agree’ and asked them to name some of their go-to foundries. Instead of naming foundries, most people named type distributors or other websites, not the people or businesses actually making the type. This seems to indicate that there is brand loyalty, but perhaps not necessarily foundry loyalty. Customers probably don’t fully understand the term “foundry” to mean the type designer(s) who make the font, but rather see it as a catch all for anyone selling type. This shouldn’t be a surprise; this is a very specific industry term. It is worth revisiting our use of this term and evaluate if there is something more customer-friendly that we can use.

Perhaps you’re reading this and wondering where the term “foundry” comes from and why we use it. This harkens back to the days of metal type, when fonts were cast in metal in a foundry. I have the job title “Foundry Manager.” When searching for that on LinkedIn, it’s just me and a bunch of people in the metalworking industry!

The results to these statements indicate that people don’t necessarily have positive feelings about font subscription plans, don’t think the process of buying fonts is confusing, somewhat agree that they look for discounted fonts first, and somewhat agree that font licensing is confusing.

Pricing

There are two questions to determine price points for two common font categories — a workhorse font family and a script font family. The following results are ONLY respondents from the US.

I asked a separate question about discounting:

I think a font must be a lower quality if it is discounted at:

• 90% off or more
• 75% off or more
• 50% off or more
• 30% off or more
• Any discount at all.
• I don’t associate discounting with lower quality fonts.

The most notable results (and compared to last year):

These results indicate that people don’t think of discounted fonts as lower quality. If you want to discount your products, you should do so knowing that the discount by itself won’t contribute to the quality perception for most customers. If you are worried about this at all, stick to discounts lower than 75%.

Keep reading! Check out Part 3/3 here →

My new favorite section is all about font feelings. See part three for information about how customers and type designers feel about variable fonts, major font brands, and if fonts are sexy. The presentation will wrap up with a dive into the customer journey and data-based customer segments.

Mary Catherine Pflug is passionate about the type designers who make fonts and the graphic designers who use them. She leads the foundry team at MyFonts, managing 2,500+ foundry partners, and spearheads the Font Purchasing Habits Survey research initiative. She helps run TypeCon as the treasurer of the SOTA board and volunteer coordinator. She also sits on the city council of Bay State Design Shop, a community design organization in the New England area.

The 2018 Font Purchasing Habits Survey Results: Part 2/3 was originally published in Font Stuff on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Demographics & Distributors

Welcome to Part 1 of 3 of the Font Purchasing Habits Survey Results. This content is so long that I’ve decided to split it up.

INDEX:

Part 1: Demographics & Distributors
Check out Part 1 to see the demographics of survey respondents, this year’s list of most popular font distributors, and how this list stacks up to site traffic data.

Part 2: Font Features, Evaluation, & Pricing
Part two contains information about the font features customers want, how customers evaluate fonts, and the prices they are willing to pay. Additionally, part two contains Likert scale questions and four new questions asked this year about licensing, budgeting, spending, and managing fonts!

Part 3: Font Feelings & Customer Segments
My new favorite section is all about font feelings. See part three for information about how customers and type designers feel about variable fonts, major font brands, and if fonts are still sexy. The presentation will wrap up with a dive into the customer journey and data-based customer segments.

To read the full presentation, click here.
You can download the PDF slides here.

The third annual Font Purchasing Habits Survey ran for 45 days from May 5 to June 20, 2018. I asked 56 questions related to font preferences and purchasing habits. Respondents who completed the survey received a pack of 15 fonts great Monotype fonts for free. The results of this anonymous survey were debuted in August at TypeCon2018 in Portland, Oregon. This article contains the talk and the original slides.

I created and printed booklets to accompany the talk, and all TypeCon attendees received them in their goodie bags. Thanks to the fine people at Scout Books for the expert printing!

I am happy to announce that we received a record-breaking 15,745 responses this year!

This is a really useful dataset. For a population of 17 million creative professionals, we have a confidence level of 99% with a confidence interval of 1. What this means is that if 50% of the survey respondents choose an answer, then we can be 99% sure that between 49% and 51% of the population would choose the same answer.

This is in large part due to our amazing sponsors. Big thanks to them for spreading the word and supporting this research.

Additionally, survey takers received 15 Monotype fonts for free if they completed the survey. This was no easy task as there were 56 questions.

Over time, the survey has grown in unexpected ways. You can see the past three years below. Between 2017 and 2018, we saw the number of responses grow 506%!

The goal of this survey is to focus in on the font user and the font customer. The driving question is “What do customers want?”

The short answer is… fonts! The long answer is a bit more complicated, as we’ll see. In this article, I’ll focus on the following things — survey demographics, YOY comparisons, customer segments, general purchasing habits, and my new favorite category — Font Feelings!

Demographics

• 65% of respondents are White or Caucasian.
• We see the skill level normally distributed, with 74% reporting intermediate or advanced skill level.
• 55% report purchasing 1 to 10 individual fonts in a year on average.
• 52% of the survey respondents are male and 39% are female.
• 69% say they use fonts as part of their job.
• The average age is 41.6 years, with a median and mode of 40.

Responses came in from 119 countries. 46% were from the US.

57% report using fonts primarily in the field of graphic design. Of those 57%, 41% are freelancers.

More Demographics

29% of survey takers report that they personally know a type designer, and 8% report that they have created and sold a typeface at some point in their life. It should be noted that this 8% isn’t the type designers who are full time or who make their living with type — this 8% is ANYONE who has EVER made a typeface.

• 21% of respondents don’t know if they have software where they can access alternate characters and use OpenType features in fonts!!!
• 44% of respondents use fonts from a subscription service.
• 67% of respondents are aware that Adobe Typekit is included with an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.
• 73% of respondents pay for a subscription music or video service.

Font Distributors

Respondents were asked the following question:

“Please select all of the suppliers you have used to pay for or download fonts in the past 6 months. (multiple answers possible)”

They could select as many responses as they wanted.

It should be noted here that the results of this question are specific to the respondents of this survey and do not accurately reflect the behavior of the entire population of type customers because this is a convenience sample.

You can see the top 8, this year compared to last year:

In the chart below, you can see all responses (except the lowest 4, removed because they had less than 150 responses each, making the results not statistically significant). You can read the following chart by saying, for example: “43% of survey takers say they have used Google Fonts in the past 6 months.” Additionally, customers report that they use an average of 4 different distributors. Last year, this was 5.

One way to test the accuracy and relevancy of the survey responses for this particular question is to compare the self-reported survey data to site traffic data estimates. I used a free trial of the SEM Rush service for this.

Examining the bars in the same chart but using SEM Rush site traffic estimates will reveal how the survey results map to reality. The goal is to have more tall bars on the left and more short bars on the right…

And overall, it looks pretty good! The only outlier is Envato, which had high site traffic but low survey response. One reason for this could be that it is not just a font website, but rather focuses on many different kinds of creative assets, fonts being only a small part.

Additionally, there is a caveat for the figure for Adobe Typekit Subscription. This percentage does not take into account the fact that it is integrated into Adobe Creative Cloud. We can’t measure the traffic of Typekit inside Creative Cloud, so it is likely that this number is much larger. The data shown here is for the website https://typekit.com/.

We are unable to get estimates for some categories. Google Fonts is a subdomain of Google so there is no data available. The categories “Free font websites” “Other” and “Individual type designers websites” have no data because they are broad categories. We are unable to get data for Future Fonts because their URL ends in .xyz.

I recommend anyone who sells anything, especially fonts, to use a tool like SEM Rush to look up site traffic data when they are considering offering their fonts online for sale or working with a distributor. This is a FREE tool that anyone can use, and there is no reason not to get as much information as possible when making a decision! Site traffic can indicate the number of customers that could discover your products on different sites.

Keep reading! Check out Part 2/3 here →

Part two contains information about the font features customers want, how customers evaluate fonts, and the prices they are willing to pay. Additionally, part two contains Likert scale questions and four new questions asked this year about licensing, budgeting, spending, and managing fonts!

Mary Catherine Pflug is passionate about the type designers who make fonts and the graphic designers who use them. She leads the foundry team at MyFonts, managing 2,500+ foundry partners, and spearheads the Font Purchasing Habits Survey research initiative. She helps run TypeCon as the treasurer of the SOTA board and volunteer coordinator. She also sits on the city council of Bay State Design Shop, a community design organization in the New England area.

The 2018 Font Purchasing Habits Survey Results: Part 1/3 was originally published in Font Stuff on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This article can also be found in a more user-friendly three-part version, starting with Part 1. This complete article is super long and contains the full survey presentation content. You’ve been warned!

Part 1: Demographics & Distributors
Check out Part 1 to see the demographics of survey respondents, this year’s list of most popular font distributors, and how this list stacks up to site traffic data.

Part 2: Font Features, Evaluation, & Pricing
Part two contains information about the font features customers want, how customers evaluate fonts, and the prices they are willing to pay. Additionally, part two contains Likert scale questions and four new questions asked this year about licensing, budgeting, spending, and managing fonts!

Part 3: Font Feelings & Customer Segments
My new favorite section is all about font feelings. See part three for information about how customers and type designers feel about variable fonts, major font brands, and if fonts are still sexy. The presentation will wrap up with a dive into the customer journey and data-based customer segments.

Watch the video here!

The third annual Font Purchasing Habits Survey ran for 45 days from May 5 to June 20, 2018. I asked 56 questions related to font preferences and purchasing habits. Respondents who completed the survey received a pack of 15 great Monotype fonts for free. The results of this anonymous survey were debuted in August at TypeCon2018 in Portland, Oregon. This article contains the talk and the original slides.

I created and printed booklets to accompany the talk, and all TypeCon attendees received them in their goodie bags. Thanks to the fine people at Scout Books for the expert printing!

I am happy to announce that we received a record-breaking 15,745 responses this year!

This is a really useful dataset. For a population of 17 million creative professionals, we have a confidence level of 99% with a confidence interval of 1. What this means is that if 50% of the survey respondents choose an answer, then we can be 99% sure that between 49% and 51% of the population would choose the same answer.

This is in large part due to our amazing sponsors. Big thanks to them for spreading the word and supporting this research.

Additionally, survey takers received 15 Monotype fonts for free if they completed the survey. This was no easy task as there were 56 questions.

Over time, the survey has grown in unexpected ways. You can see the past three years below. Between 2017 and 2018, we saw the number of responses grow 506%!

The goal of this survey is to focus in on the font user and the font customer. The driving question is “What do customers want?”

The short answer is… fonts! The long answer is a bit more complicated, as we’ll see. In this article, I’ll focus on the following things — survey demographics, YOY comparisons, customer segments, general purchasing habits, and my new favorite category—Font Feelings!

Demographics

• 65% of respondents are White or Caucasian.
• We see the skill level normally distributed, with 74% reporting intermediate or advanced skill level.
• 55% report purchasing 1 to 10 individual fonts in a year on average.
• 52% of the survey respondents are male and 39% are female.
• 69% say they use fonts as part of their job.
• The average age is 41.6 years, with a median and mode of 40.

Responses came in from 119 countries. 46% were from the US.

57% report using fonts primarily in the field of graphic design. Of those 57%, 41% are freelancers.

Font Distributors

Respondents were asked the following question:

“Please select all of the suppliers you have used to pay for or download fonts in the past 6 months. (multiple answers possible)”

They could select as many responses as they wanted.

It should be noted here that the results of this question are specific to the respondents of this survey and do not accurately reflect the behavior of the entire population of type customers because this is a convenience sample.

You can see the top 8, this year compared to last year:

In the chart below, you can see all responses (except the lowest 4, removed because they had less than 150 responses each, making the results not statistically significant). You can read the following chart by saying, for example: “43% of survey takers say they have used Google Fonts in the past 6 months.” Additionally, customers report that they use an average of 4 different distributors. Last year, this was 5.

One way to test the accuracy and relevancy of the survey responses for this particular question is to compare the self-reported survey data to site traffic data estimates. I used a free trial of the SEM Rush service for this.

Examining the bars in the same chart but using SEM Rush site traffic estimates will reveal how the survey results map to reality. The goal is to have more tall bars on the left and more short bars on the right…

And overall, it looks pretty good! The only outlier is Envato, which had high site traffic but low survey response. One reason for this could be that it is not just a font website, but rather focuses on many different kinds of creative assets, fonts being only a small part.

Additionally, there is a caveat for the figure for Adobe Typekit Subscription. This percentage does not take into account the fact that it is integrated into Adobe Creative Cloud. We can’t measure the traffic of Typekit inside Creative Cloud, so it is likely that this number is much larger. The data shown here is for the website https://typekit.com/.

We are unable to get estimates for some categories. Google Fonts is a subdomain of Google so there is no data available. The categories “Free font websites” “Other” and “Individual type designers websites” have no data because they are broad categories. We are unable to get data for Future Fonts because their URL ends in .xyz.

I recommend anyone who sells anything, especially fonts, to use a tool like SEM Rush to look up site traffic data when they are considering offering their fonts online for sale or working with a distributor. This is a FREE tool that anyone can use, and there is no reason not to get as much information as possible when making a decision! Site traffic can indicate the number of customers that could discover your products on different sites.

More Demographics

29% of survey takers report that they personally know a type designer, and 8% report that they have created and sold a typeface at some point in their life. It should be noted that this 8% isn’t the type designers who are full time or who make their living with type — this 8% is ANYONE who has EVER made a typeface.

• 21% of respondents don’t know if they have software where they can access alternate characters and use OpenType features in fonts!!!
• 44% of respondents use fonts from a subscription service.
• 67% of respondents are aware that Adobe Typekit is included with an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.
• 73% of respondents pay for a subscription music or video service.

Font Features & Font Evaluation

There are two distinct but essential parts of the font purchase. The first is what features customers want when they download or buy a typeface. The second is how customers are evaluating fonts. The following two questions dive into these topics.

Font Features

The #1 thing font customers care about are the numbers of styles in a font family.

As you can see, 82% of customers say they care about the number of styles in the font family.

Font Evaluation

When asked about font evaluation, customers want to see the entire character set, type out their own words and phrases, see if the font has alternates and ligatures, and select and compare fonts with each other.

Here you can see a comparison to 2017.

New Questions!

This year, I added some new questions about font licensing, font budgeting, font spending, and managing fonts.

Likert Scale Statements

I showed survey takers a series of statements, and asked them to respond on a scale of agree to disagree. Their answers can be converted to a scale of 1 to 5, with 3 being neutral.

You can see a few of the interesting results below, and any changes from 2017.

It is worth making a note about the bottom left statement “There are a few foundries that are my go-to for fonts. I check their fonts first to see if they have what I need before browsing.” The results of this statement may be misleading. I asked a follow up question to anyone who responded ‘agree’ or ‘somewhat agree’ and asked them to name some of their go-to foundries. Instead of naming foundries, most people named type distributors or other websites, not the people or businesses actually making the type. This seems to indicate that there is brand loyalty, but perhaps not necessarily foundry loyalty. Customers probably don’t fully understand the term “foundry” to mean the type designer(s) who make the font, but rather see it as a catch all for anyone selling type. This shouldn’t be a surprise; this is a very specific industry term. It is worth revisiting our use of this term and evaluate if there is something more customer-friendly that we can use.

Perhaps you’re reading this and wondering where the term “foundry” comes from and why we use it. This harkens back to the days of metal type, when fonts were cast in metal in a foundry. I have the job title “Foundry Manager.” When searching for that on LinkedIn, it’s just me and a bunch of people in the metalworking industry!

The results to these statements indicate that people don’t necessarily have positive feelings about font subscription plans, don’t think the process of buying fonts is confusing, somewhat agree that they look for discounted fonts first, and somewhat agree that font licensing is confusing.

Pricing

There are two questions to determine price points for two common font categories — a workhorse font family and a script font family. The following results are ONLY respondents from the US.

I asked a separate question about discounting:

I think a font must be a lower quality if it is discounted at:

• 90% off or more
• 75% off or more
• 50% off or more
• 30% off or more
• Any discount at all.
• I don’t associate discounting with lower quality fonts.

The most notable results (and compared to last year):

These results indicate that people don’t think of discounted fonts as lower quality. If you want to discount your products, you should do so knowing that the discount by itself won’t contribute to the quality perception for most customers. If you are worried about this at all, stick to discounts lower than 75%.

Font Feelings

This new section called ‘Font Feelings’ is my new favorite category. Here we’ll dive into how customers and type designers feel about variable fonts and major font brands.

For fun, I asked respondents if they think fonts can be sexy:

Variable Font Feelings

I asked the following question about variable last year too, so now we can compare answers year over year to see how variable font awareness and perception changes over time.

These 2018 results may seem very familiar to you if you read last year’s results; very little has changed since 2017.

Additionally, type designers still have very different responses than the rest of the population:

Additionally, I asked four Likert scale questions related to concepts behind or functions of variable fonts. I wanted to see if survey takers may have a need for variable fonts, even if they may not know what they are.

Font Company Feelings

There were five new questions this year to really dive into brand perception. I asked the following question about five major design brands related to fonts: Adobe, Monotype, MyFonts, Creative Market, and Google Fonts. The respondents were also shown the logo of each brand.

This word bank was carefully crafted to reduce value judgement. No overtly positive or negative ‘judgement’ words were used — there was no “good” and “bad”, “ugly” or “pretty”. Instead, the goal was to collect responses to form a more nuanced view of how users see each brand. You may also notice that there are some words with loose foils; monopoly vs. democratic, cutting-edge vs. historic, accessible vs. elite.

The Results:

I was also curious to see how type designers vs. the rest of the population perceive these brands. In general, type designers are using the words “monopoly” and “democratic” more than the rest of the population.

Customer Segments

I’ve had an idea for quite some time, and with this survey I now had data to be able to present and provide evidence for it.

Let’s look at the journey of the type customer. We can start by creating an x and y axis. Y is volume of customers. X is the monetary value that customer brings to the industry.

Customers get on this map by first discovering or consciously recognizing that fonts exist. Perhaps they discover different fonts they like from a drop down menu in Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Maybe they see something that is designed with a really illegible font and they have a negative reaction. Maybe they even see a meme or funny tweet about fonts. The first dot appears on our map:

At this point, there are many customers(font users), but they have no or little monetary value; they’re not spending money.

The next step is when those customers decide to download a free font — illegally or legally. They make the effort to go out and search, evaluate, download and install a font.

This dot is lower in volume, because not everyone who knows fonts exist will go out and download a font. But the value increases slightly because perhaps when they do this, they are seeing ads.

Next, something happens to cause the customers who download a free font to make the jump and purchase their first font. Perhaps they download lots of free fonts and their font education increases; they start to encounter technical or quality issues with free fonts and thus need a better solution. Perhaps they encounter a licensing issue and must buy the font to be compliant. Maybe they even get to a place where they have the budget to actually buy a font. Whatever the reason, they’re now in and providing real monetary value.

From here, customers will then move to purchasing fonts regularly.

The next step is needing different licenses.

Finally, the last step is for the customer to become someone who truly values type:

Perhaps they are commissioning custom type, buying very large licenses, or advocating for the considered use of fonts in their business as tools for success. These customers bring the most value, but these are the fewest.

Font subscription users fall along the path in the middle, for people who need to purchase fonts regularly or need different licenses.

Now this may be a nice theory. However, to really make this actionable and useful, we need to look at some data. We can do this by grouping users based on a survey question that maps perfectly to each of these steps:

In the following profiles, there are three primary questions that help to show how each customer group changes: their use of software with OpenType features, the categories of licenses they need, and their skill level. At the bottom of each panel is a grid of other factors that may produce interesting results and could be indicators for behavior.

Let’s dive into each customer group, starting with those who only download free fonts:

As you can see, 39% of these users don’t know if they have access to software with OpenType Features! These users need the most personal use licenses, and the skill levels are skewed towards the lower skill levels. The red blocks are the lowest percentages you’ll see, and the green blocks are the highest numbers you’ll see in the following profiles. This customer group has the highest percent of casual users, the most people who don’t know about variable fonts, and the most percent of people who agree that fonts are too expensive and font licensing is too confusing. This group has the fewest people who know a type designer, the fewest percentage of people who are a type designer, and the fewest percent of people who pay for a subscription music or video service.

With the group purchasing 1–10 fonts, we see that more people now have OpenType software, Desktop licenses become the primary license needed, and the skill level now becomes more normally distributed. The lowest figures are now increasing and the highest figures and now decreasing. For example, the percent of causal users dropped from 56% to 31%, and the number of people who pay for a video or music subscription increased from 59% to 73%.

For those that buy 11–25 fonts, OpenType use has increased, desktop license use has increased while personal license use has decreased, and the skill level is now skewing towards advanced.

Again, we see the same trends as in the previous profile continuing, with more people knowing they have and using OpenType, and the skill level skewing more to the right. Extended licenses use is increasing here too.

In this profile, we see extended licenses jump past webfont licenses. Skill level is high, OpenType use is high, and the fewest percent of people think font licensing is confusing, at only 19%.

Now we jump backwards and look at subscription users. This group has the most need for webfont licenses, and you can see that the skill level distribution has backed down to being more normally distributed, at intermediate and advanced. This group has the highest percent of people who pay for a music or video subscription, at 83%. The pie chart showing results to the question about OpenType use is now most similar to the results for the “11–25 fonts” group.

The goal is to take customers from discovering fonts exist to becoming people who value type.

But the problem is that this graph is going down, because there are so few people who value type. To make the group of people who value type increase in volume, there are a few things we can do.

1. Type Education

By ‘Type Education’ I don’t mean just traditional type education. If someone is going out searching to learn more about type, they’re going to find it. And it is important to ensure that there are good resources out there for those who want to learn more. What we also need to focus on is educating those who aren’t looking actively to be educated about fonts. Finding ways to educate users while they are browsing or shopping, or along the purchase path will generate impact.

2. Font Awareness

Font Awareness is very different from Type Education. Increasing font awareness will get more people into the first step of this diagram. There are so many people out there who become very interested in or curious about fonts once they discover on a conscious level that fonts exist. We can help the public connect the dots that fonts are made by humans, that fonts can be a valuable tool in business, that fonts are intellectual property, and that fonts are actually quite accessible.

3. User Experience

The final step to increasing the number of people who value type is providing a superb user experience. I’m not just talking about UX in the traditional sense, but instead holistically about the experiences of buying, managing, and using fonts. Accessible customer support, font management solutions that are delightful and effortless, and ways to make licensing more palatable are they keys here, because they are the biggest pain points.

Thank you for your time, and for making it to the end of this long article! Please feel free to download the entire slide deck here. For more font research, follow me on twitter and here on Medium.

Mary Catherine Pflug is passionate about the type designers who make fonts and the graphic designers who use them. She leads the foundry team at MyFonts + Monotype, managing 2,500+ foundry partners, and spearheads the Font Purchasing Habits Survey research initiative. She helps run TypeCon as the treasurer of the SOTA board and volunteer coordinator. She also sits on the city council of Bay State Design Shop, a community design organization in the New England area.

The 2018 Font Purchasing Habits Survey Results (Complete Edition) was originally published in Font Stuff on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s that time of year again folks. Font survey time!

The third annual Font Purchasing Habits Survey is back and better than ever. We’ve got new questions, more fonts you get for free for completing the survey, and the results will be shared with the public at TypeCon and online, as usual.

The Font Purchasing Habits Survey is an anonymous survey for anyone who uses fonts. I’m collecting opinions to help foundries, type designers, and font distributors in our design community to better understand the people who need and love fonts! Because fonts are both tools and art, and licensed online rather than sold like traditional products, font makers and sellers face unique challenges. More information is needed to better support customers and users! Join one of the largest public font customer research efforts to shed more light on this under-studied topic.

Take the survey today! Deadline June 20, 2018.

What’s New?

More fonts for free

Last year, after completing the survey, you got 9 fonts for free. This year, when you complete the survey, you’ll get 15 fonts for free! Special thanks to Monotype who has provided these awesome fonts. The fonts are licensed under a single user MyFonts desktop license. With a desktop license, you can install a font in your computer’s fonts folder and use it in any of your favorite applications that contain a font menu. Create and print documents for clients, as well as static images (JPEG, TIFF, PNG), even if the images are used on the web or in a mobile app.

More partners

We’ve got some amazing partners on board this year who are helping to spread awareness about the survey. More partners = more font users the survey can reach. A huge thank you to Adobe Typekit, Extensis, Google Fonts, Fontspring, dribbble, Glyphs App, Fonts.com, Linotype.com, and FontShop! 👏👏👏👏👏

New Questions

Every year the survey evolves and improves. Having learned from past surveys and factoring in new industry information, I’ve added new questions and improved existing ones.

The most significant new component of the survey is brand perception questions. You’ll be asked to pick a word you most associate with different brands. I’m very excited to see and share the results.

Additionally, there are new questions about preferred payment methods, how users or organize/manage fonts, types of licenses needed, variable fonts, and more questions about subscriptions.

All the results of the survey will be shared at TypeCon2018 in Portland Oregon, and will also be posted here on Medium shortly after. Don’t want to wait? Check out last year’s results!

We recently launched our call for talk submissions for the 20th anniversary of TypeCon. In the past, we accepted 20 min or 40 min talk submissions. This year, we’re trying something new.

If you don’t know about TypeCon, it’s the longest-running annual US-based typography, lettering, and font-focused conference. It’s one of the few remaining conferences where the programming is not driven by invitation-only speakers; we call for talk and workshop submissions, and are open to anyone who applies. We use a double-blind voting process to determine the accepted speakers. Each member of the voting committee does not see the name, gender, ethnicity, or biography of the applicant, and does not see how the other members of the committee votes. After implementing this process two years ago, our program diversity has increased.

It’s our 20th anniversary, and instead of one keynote speaker, we’re going to have three — the fabulous Lauren Hom, Louise Fili, and Nina Stossinger.

In part to balance this increase in longer keynote talks, we’re switching up the program to contain only 20 minute talks and panels. Here’s why we’re trying it this year:

1. Attention spans
   Scientific data available about the average human attention span is highly variable and debatable; some (questionable) studies report the fantastical figure of 8 seconds; others (with unacceptably vague sources) say 7–10 minutes. Even without hard evidence, I am confident that the average attention span is definitely not 40 minutes. Successful speaking models concur; Ted Talks generally stick to 18 minutes, and Pecha Kuchas are 6 minutes and 40 seconds.
2. Better content
   As a long-time conference audience member and a victim of drawn-out corporate meetings, I feel confident that in general, the content of a 40 minute talk can be condensed to 20 minutes and be much more compelling. Packing a ton of content in a shorter period of time forces editing, decision-making, and (in general) results in tighter, more successful talks.
3. Longer coffee breaks
   By only having 20 minute talks, the pacing of the conference can be adjusted to allow for more lengthy coffee breaks and more opportunities for the community-building parts of the conference that everyone loves.
4. More diversity and inclusion
   We must turn away many fantastic proposals each year due to the fact that we can only accept so many speakers. By removing the 40 minute slots, this year we should be able to accept a few more speakers, and even more diverse content.

This year, we’re going to try out the 20 minute talk program and see what happens. It may or may not work, and we can always switch back next year if needed.

Do you have something to say? Say it at TypeCon’s 20th anniversary and submit your talk here: http://www.typecon.com/archives/6364

I had to establish some ground rules. Using my phone was going to be okay — the only screens I couldn’t look at were laptops and the television. How hard could it be? I remember being a kid and playing outside all day, back when using the computer prevented the phone from working. I don’t consider myself to be too obsessed with social media… my posts to Instagram are sporadic and my Facebook posts are even less frequent — so much so that I deleted the app from my phone. My one trouble area is Twitter, which I can’t seem to get enough of. I went to bed fairly confident that the following day would be a breeze, and my poor bloodshot eye would have some time to heal.

I woke up at 8am, grumpy that my body didn’t let me sleep in later. For the next four hours, I snooze in and out, piling up the pillows on one side of me to block some light from the windows. I scroll through Twitter on my phone, getting caught up on all the ‘Twitter moments’ (those curated sets of tweets you can swipe through). When I see ‘moments’ that are critical about the Trump Administration or the GOP, I always wonder if there is a positive version of the ‘Twitter moment’ that is shown to the other half of twitter, determined based on the kinds of tweets people like.

After running out of things to read on twitter, I pick up a magazine. Having been gone for almost a month over the holidays, my magazine backlog was out of control. The best part about reading so many magazines is coming across articles about the same topics, because usually each magazine comes to a completely different conclusion.

My screen-free day was ridiculously productive. I got out of bed at noon and did the following things:

• Walked 4 miles
• Talked to my parents on the phone
• Read 5 magazines cover-to-cover
• Researched a new crochet stitch(on my phone) and went to the store for the hook I needed for it
• Went to the grocery store
• Made chili
• Went to bed at 9:45pm

That is probably the earliest I have gone to bed in… years. And I woke up this morning at 9:45am feeling great. Great enough to grab my laptop and write about it first thing. My eye is still a little bloodshot, but improved.

I made it through the day. But it wasn’t easy. Some observations:

• I probably spent more time on my phone than I normally do.
• It was so quiet. I usually like to have the tv on in the background while cooking, so when I was making chili I ended up playing music from my phone.
• I was tempted to use my computer to do more research about that crochet stitch. But I resisted.
• I felt myself getting… bored. Which is not a feeling I’m used to.
• The only reason I went to bed so early was to keep myself from turning on Netflix, which is a bad habit I’ve recently gotten into before bed. I wasn’t tired. I used a meditation app to calm my mind and then, miraculously, fell asleep.

It reminded me of when I was living in Prague. There, my best friend was a vegan, so we found every vegan restaurant Prague had to offer. Because of her, my diet ended up changing slightly. As a result, I felt kind of ‘empty’ inside, but also cleaner and healthier. Going screen-free for a day felt exactly like that.

Will I do it again? Definitely. However, my goal is to do it only twice per month. Right now, it’s simply not sustainable to do it more with my lifestyle. Perhaps eventually I’ll be able to do a whole weekend.

This article doesn’t have a neat conclusion, and I’m not going to wrap this up with an analogy to millennials, or the tech industry, or the effects of technology. Try going screen free for a day. Everyone is different. Maybe it will help you too.

In the 2017 Font Purchasing Habits Survey, I asked customers the following open-ended question:

What does it mean to you when you see a font with “Pro” in the name? For example: Sarah Script vs. Sarah Script Pro

2,006 individuals gave me an answer, and I’m here today to tell you what they think! To see the demographics of the respondents, refer to my original Font Purchasing Habits Survey post here.

Context

Naming typefaces is hard. Typeface retail success, popularity, and recognizability is largely dependent on picking a good name, among other factors. Prime example: Proxima Nova, Helvetica, Papyrus, & Comic Sans. Unmistakable! There are a lot of typefaces out there. For type designers, the typeface name is a building block that can set their fonts up for success.

A popular naming convention is attaching “Pro” to the end of a typeface’s name. Across the industry, there is no standardization. Customers can’t be sure what Pro means. Some foundries ensure that they maintain standardization across their library and name their fonts to reflect this (see Bruno Maag’s 2017 ATypI talk). For the most part, regulating font names has been impossible for large foundries and distributors at scale (so far).

Historically, the suffix Pro has been applied to typeface names to mean many things:

1. Pro fonts contain a particular character set that would accommodate more languages than the non-Pro.
2. Pro fonts have been re-designed and/or improved, thus implying that there is an older version out there (generally labeled Std or removed from sale).
3. Pro fonts are designed for professional users and contain OpenType features.
4. The type designer thinks the font is high quality, so they name it Pro.
5. Marketing tactic.
6. Any combination of the above.

A Brief History

Both Monotype and Adobe have long histories of using suffixes in font names to denote font features. I’ll summarize them below:

Adobe

• Pro is used to designate Adobe fonts with expanded language coverage. Not all adobe fonts are Pro.
• It appears that Adobe was the first foundry to implement the use of Pro, but I haven’t found a reliable source to confirm.
• Adobe will also sell fonts that cover specific languages, with suffixes for specific languages. You can see the terminology used for their specific character sets here.
• Today, the Adobe Originals Collection on Typekit does not attach Pro to the ends of their font names at a family level, yet when you drill down into the actual font styles/font file names displayed within each family, they are named Pro. Adobe fonts sold on other retailers like FontSpring do contain the Pro or Std label in the family name.

Monotype

• As with Adobe, Pro is used to designated language support. Its definition has evolved & expanded over time.
• Std, Pro, W1G, W2G, WGL, and Paneuropean (another name for WGL) are all are suffixes that relate to language coverage.
• Same as Adobe, Monotype sometimes breaks out languages into separate fonts, with the suffixes based on specific language (i.e. Greek, Cyrillic, Japanese, Arabic, etc).
• Often Pro fonts have Std versions still available for sale for backwards compatibility needs.

Data

To properly analyze the qualitative data resulting from my open-ended question “What does it mean to you when you see a font with the word ‘Pro’ in the name?”, I cleaned all the individual text responses. This involved making the data consistent and turning it into values I could analyze.

I took the following steps:

• Corrected spelling errors
• Made all capitalization consistent
• Made British/American spellings consistent
• Disregarded all responses not in English (there were only a handful)
• Removed all non-essential words (it, a, and, I, think, font, typeface, etc.)

Additionally, I made words that had the same meanings consistent in order to properly count the frequency of use:

• alt / alts / alternative / alternate = alternates
• All variations of “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure” = IDK
• a lot / a lot of / lots of / lots = many
• commercially = commercial
• languages / language = language-support
• ligs / lig / ligas / ligature = ligatures
• licensing / licensed / license / licenses = licensed
• kern / kerned = kerning
• legitimacy / legit = legitimate

As you can imagine, this took forever. Also, I was astounded by the variety of ways in which humans can express themselves. Words are amazing!

This data cleaning resulted in 7,322 cleaned keywords out of 20,931 total words from 2,006 individual responses.

Results

The following graph shows the words used to describe ‘Pro’ that had more than 20 occurrences. This paints a broad picture of the things users expect Pro fonts to contain or that the label Pro designates.

The most popular word — used 701 times — is “more.” This is followed by language-support, used 365 times. Features, ligatures, OpenType, alternates, weights follow. The most difficult aspect to measure is ‘quality.’ The word ‘better’ was used 96 times, and ‘quality’ was used 30 times. It is likely that people consider fonts that have more stuff in them to be higher quality, without implicitly saying it.

General Themes

1. More, more, more
2. Language support
3. OpenType features

Pro fonts today are generally associated with all three historical aspects of font naming evolution mentioned in the history section. Pro fonts must have OpenType features, language support, and just more of everything.

The most interesting part of this analysis was reading the responses directly from font users. I’ve curated some of the most interesting/revealing ones for you below.

Some general quotes:

“the pro version has lots more ‘bits’”

“When I see ‘pro‘ I always hope it involves some additional weights plus beautiful ligatures and Open Type alts. When I click on a family marked ‘pro‘ that doesn’t offer these extras, I automatically decide the description is misleading.”

“When I see ‘Pro’ attached to the end of a font name I definitely trust it more and have the confidence that it’s been created by a professional designer or type foundry. I am more likely to pay for a ‘Pro’ font but I would like to see in the description why it’s labeled as such.”

“The ‘best’ in the industry.”

“Some difference, but probably not very scientifically based. Leaves the impression that the design of the font has taken into account how designers and professionals would use it.”

“Pro means that it supports a wide range of languages (expect all diacritics for western/eastern european latin languages). Can include additional ligatures and should support all types of figures. Extensive symbol support too. Essentially, I expect to be able to typeset a book in a wide variety of languages and not have to use hacks to achieve what I want.”

“Pro indicates to me that kerning is superb, it automatically flows effortlessly, every character has been considered. Multi-language support is well set and it has intuitive diacritics. A full set of weights, perhaps 18–32 considering extended and condensed.”

“From the name alone, seems to be more legitimate/worthy/verified by a typographic organization. I have no idea, I don’t think I pay enough attention! It feels more serious.”

“Legitimacy, high quality”

“Gives it more gravitas”

Potential Bias Present

It is possible that people using the term OpenType were talking about either OpenType features or the OpenType font format.

It is also possible that people who say they don’t care about “Pro” actually are subliminally influenced by the label. As always, what people say and what people do are not always the same.

Other Themes

Licensing

People seemed to associated Pro with licensing for commercial use. The word “commercial” was used 45 times, and the word “licensed” or an equivalent term was used 24 times.

“The font is used commercially or has specific licensing requirements for purchase.”

“That the font is available for purchase to use commercially.”

“The pro one would have a commercial license.”

“Never thought about it. Comes with a license?”

Free vs. Paid Fonts

Pro was associated with having to pay for fonts, and often that there may be a free equivalent.

“To me, seeing “Pro” at the end means that it’s the paid version. I’ve seen so many times where people have lifted and re-listed typefaces for free download and I have scooped them up not realizing they were meant to be paid for and then I’ve stumbled across them in the font libraries at work and they’re listed as Pro. Or that there are two versions and the free one that I had scooped up didn’t have all the glyphs and ligatures and small caps and fun stuff that comes with the Pro version that is not free.”

“That the one without Pro was a demo/free version. Or alternatively that by using the Pro version I’d gain access to alternates and glyphs etc.”

“seems like there may be a free version with less stuff”

“I might think there is a free version of this font and the pro has a ton more options to it.”

“I assume that the Pro the full and complete version, with all the alternates, ligatures, weights and all the other options that are available (small caps, italics, etc), whereas the regular (non-pro) version is the free version available on sites like dafont. And, of course I assume that the Pro version includes commercial use. I’d be very upset if I bought a font only to find out that there was a “better” paid version of the font. I’d feel cheated and would NEVER again buy from that designer or site.”

Adobe

Eight people specifically referred to Adobe in association with Pro. Some actually referred to Adobe fonts, while others talked about fonts that can be used in Adobe software.

“That it was developed by a well-regarded typography company like Adobe or Hoefler.”

“Pro means open type features, and it’s built for industry standard programs (adobe products etc) non pro I would expect to use in word or PowerPoint without as many special features”

“Nothing. Probably a paid font, but then again Adobe’s Source Code/Sans families use “Pro”, too.”

“It doesn’t mean much to me unless I’m familiar with the specific foundry’s naming practices. In all cases I would assume the pro font has a larger character set, but whether that indicates more extensive language coverage (as adobe does) or a more extensive set of alternates wouldn’t be apparent so I would definitely look for an explanation before purchasing.”

and four people just typed “Adobe” in without any other explanation.

Marketing

Some people think that it’s ‘just marketing.’ 19 people used the word ‘marketing.’

“Marketing bullshit”

“Lazy marketing technique.”

“In theory: OpenType features? In practice: probably a meaningless marketing term.”

“A marketing gimmick that makes you makes you feel like the version you have is outdated…”

Nothing

Or, that it means nothing at all. 138 people used the word ‘nothing.’

“Very little. The naming of fonts has been at best ‘idiosyncratic’ so it makes no difference to me.”

“nothing. this terminology is completely inconsistent from foundry to foundry, so it has become completely meaningless.”

“Nothing. It’s 2017.”

“Nothing, since there is no standard for it.”

“Nothing anymore. ‘Pro’ used to designate a font with a larger character set, covering more languages. But today, font software makes it so easy to add those extra characters, there is usually no good reason for every font not to contain the same characters found in what used to be called a ‘Pro’ font. My expectations for any font are higher now.”

“Not a lot. I’ve looked up what this means and I don’t even remember. Presumably it didn’t seem very relevant to my needs — I just made a mental note that I can do without the Pro version.”

“It happens all the time so I perceive no extra value”

“It doesn’t mean much to me, due to many brands and products using “Pro” in its name. Not speaking of typography exclusively, but in general. A lot of things carry a “Pro” in its name just to impress people, not offering real “pro” qualities.”

“Absolutely nothing. This type of naming drives me crazy.”

Other interesting quotes:

“font weights are in digits rather than names”

“Contains more than 1,000 characters”

“Created by a team of professionals, rather than by a single designer.”

“That the printing company I work with probably has that font.”

“It makes me question if it is truly the font I’m searching for, or a re-designed counterfeit.”

“I’m hopeful that it is both Mac and PC ready and I don’t have to buy separate fonts for each. I also assume it will come with all of the weights and ligatures necessary to complete a job.”

“It has multiple versions all wrapped up into one font file.”

“All variations in one file”

“That it’s available with subscription and not on free trial”

“It means it might be slightly different so I better be sure I have the right one.”

“Extra headaches”

“I literally have never thought about this”

“haha. what makes it pro? like seriously”

Final Thoughts

So, what do we (as a community) or as individual type designers do with this information? This question is purely exploratory. My big-picture hope is that the quotes and info here get people thinking about how customers think about Pro. I was really surprised by a lot of the quotes, and some of the themes that rose to the surface out of the information. Much more must be done to understand our customers.

A general assumption that can be made is that the distinct categories used by type designers and those working in the type community are not necessarily similarly separated in the minds of customers. Many respondents didn’t separate the expectation for commercial licensing from the design of the font; language support went hand-in-hand with features like ligatures, alternates, and extras. When it comes to Pro, customers want it all.

Did you find this article helpful? What else would you like me to explore further related to typefaces and font purchasing habits?

What’s in a name? The perception of “Pro” was originally published in Font Stuff on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.