Question Font subscription?

Adobe Fonts is a pretty good perk that comes with a Creative Cloud membership. Over 1800 type families are available to sync, many of which are commercial families that cost a lot to buy outright. They periodically add more commercial families to the collection from a pretty wide variety of type foundries.

Still there is no font subscription service in existence that will cover all the bases. I try to stay on top of new releases of type families at a few different fonts websites, like MyFonts. Sometimes great or important new type families will debut with very low introductory pricing. Then there are times where you have no choice but to pay full price for a type family or an individual weight of a typeface. A few days ago I had to spend over $70 for one font file, but the client (a large national company) required it in its signage. We didn't eat the cost of that font file.

 

You could always sign up for a Adobe CC subscription to say Photoshop or Illustrator only. You have access to over 1800 fonts as long as you pay the monthly fee. In addition to having access to very high quality fonts you would have the latest version of one or more Adobe programs. Or there are lots of very high quality fonts out there that are free or low priced. Fontsquirrel has alot of great free fonts. Be careful with the quality of free fonts. Some are great and some are terrible. Dafont has lots of free or shareware fonts but not all are high quality

https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts

 

Adobe Fonts.

Monotype had one for a brief period, but that's not around anymore.

 

Just to clarify, Adobe Fonts has over 1800 type families available. Most of the individual families have multiple fonts to use, some have dozens of weights available. Overall I think it adds up to several thousand font files.

I have noticed some limitations though. A few families may have limited coverage compared to what is available through a commercial fonts site. For example the Proxima Nova family hosted on Adobe Fonts has 48 weights, which is a lot. But the full Proxima Nova family (costing over $700 at MyFonts) has 144 weights. Adobe Fonts isn't carrying the "A" and "S" sub-families, just the primary 48 weights. I synced one family called Mislab; it turned out to be the "Std" family rather than the "Pro" version equipped with a larger character set. Most of the fonts Adobe hosts through Adobe Fonts are equivalent to the commercial packages.

+1 on the Font Squirrel recommendation. The free & allowed for commercial use fonts they offer are typically pretty good. Google Fonts is also a good outlet for free fonts. One funny thing: a few of the typefaces at Adobe Fonts are also at Google Fonts.

 

Bobby H, so once you have the adobe subscription, you have access to the font library- can you sync / download to your wondows Font file?

 

Just to add to this. Be careful with the free fonts as well as some do not give permission to be used in commercial works without paying for a license. A lot of free for personal use. Now, one could get into the debate over what is the likely hood of getting caught, yadda, yadda, yadda. But just something else to keep in mind.

 

If you end your Creative Cloud membership, what happens to fonts you have used?
I assume you still have to download and install them, correct?

 

Nothing screams convert to curves more then ever.

 

I take it you mean; a person would lose the ability to open and edit text on a design once they cancelled their membership, correct?

 

That is correct. I don't know if the fonts are copied over to your computer at any time. You activate the fonts at the adobe site and then they show up in your software for use until you deactivate and I believe there is a limit as to how many you can activate at one time. So you do have to keep on top of things and not go overboard and forget to deactivate when no longer needed

As Bobby mentioned and I forgot about... Google also has a tremendous number of fonts available for use. I find that more and more logos and layouts are using those fonts so people are becoming more aware of these

 

https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html#act-img

I was wrong. There is no limit to the number of activated fonts but you probably don't want to activate too many and slow down your computer

 

I use these all the time with PWA/Electron work.

If you found a program, non Adobe, that could accurately render the file for editing and you had the font in question from another source, then you should be good to go, but that is the only way that I can think of.

I knew one guy that cancelled his subscription and opened up one program 2 minutes later to prep his files for another program, was greeted with a pop up modal that said essentially that this would be the last time he would be able to open any of his files from an Adobe program. 2 minutes later. If that is accurate, there certainly is a lot of phoning home for some things on the program. At least it appears that way to me.

 

I don't think it checks that frequently. Maybe he closed the program and reopened or something. One day this past summer I had no power and thus no internet access but I continued working on my computer for about 5 hours on battery backup until it ran out of juice but Illustrator worked fine

 

The fonts are "installed" through the Adobe Fonts website, which you can access directly at fonts.abobe.com/fonts or via the Creative Cloud desktop panel. The fonts do require an always on Internet connection.

When Typekit was first made available to Creative Cloud there was a limit of 100 fonts that anyone could sync at a given time. Thankfully Adobe removed that limit around a couple years ago. It's pretty easy to go past that 100 font limit if you activate whole type families at a time. I agree it's a good idea not to have too many fonts installed at a time. Adobe has made improvements to the Adobe Fonts web site. The "My Adobe Fonts" link will bring up all the fonts you have activated. There is a new item showing the total number of fonts you have active. There's a "deactivate all" button next to it. It's easy to go family by family or even font by font, flipping the switch to activate or deactivate fonts.

 

That sounds like a nightmare waiting to happen.

Adobe reminds of that computer company from the 90s, Packard Bell (I think), you remember them?

They were among the first PC that came out, they had just about the whole market in their pocket... but they were greedy,
they soldered their components directly to the motherboard, to keep people from fixing or upgrading their computers themselves.
They shot themselves in the foot by doing that, it pissed people off & when there were more computer manufacturing options, they
switched and never looked back.
Adobe and Apple both seem to be similar, too much of closed systems, and want to control every aspect of their products.

 

You can buy packages from Sign DNA and Letterhead Fonts. Rare occasion I have to buy something I just buy it. If it's a good font it will pay for itself many times over.

Can also buy Affinity Designer. Comes with a bunch of nice fonts and you can buy more relatively cheap.

 

Adobe isn't going to give away thousands of commercial fonts (quite a few of which are recent releases) for free, especially when the foundries who make those fonts are still charging quite a lot of money for them via normal channels.

For most of my design work I end up converting the type to outlines anyway. That solves part of the "what if" issue of ending a Creative Cloud subscription. Of course, if always having an "out" away from Adobe or any other software is important then one should be saving all art files in "generic" formats like EPS and have any application dependent effects expanded or flattened so the artwork can be imported into a different application.

The big concern I have regarding Adobe Fonts is whether they'll remove any type families from the service. They have to maintain contracts with various type foundries (and pay them a certain amount of money) to post their fonts in the Adobe Fonts service. What if a certain foundry decides it wants a whole lot more money and Adobe isn't willing to pay? I assume their fonts would go bye bye. Anyone who has those specific fonts activated in any projects would then have to go buy those fonts outright to keep using them. I don't expect Adobe to start cycling all kinds of fonts in and out of the service the same way Netflix does with a bunch of movies. But it's still a serious concern.

 

Your post is part of the reason I'm doing most work in Flexi. Once I get my feet wet with Affinity I'll be using that too.

No way to predict what can happen with subscription based anything.

 

Not totally out of the realm of possibility given what happened with Dolby. Slightly different, but still related to licensing fees etc.

That is very much the problem with the route things have gone.

I think if they were to start cycling fonts too much though, that might lose favor with their customer base, more then the Dolby fiasco.

Letterhead, if I recall correctly, is one of those that does have DRM built into their fonts as well. I don't know if it's all, but I do believe at least some do.