Have You Ever Purchased A Font?

I was curious to know if any of you folks had ever actually spent money on buying a single font?

It seems to me the prices of some fonts out there are absolutely crazy, im currently looking for a copy of Helvetica Bold and so far it seems to range in price from $75 up to $2500 to actually buy a copy :eek:

Have any of you folks ever paid for a font or do you use ones that are freely available instead?

Regards,

Lee

I did a video blog project for a very famous and rich friend of mine in Hollywood. He HAD to have a certain font that FOX used, and he paid for it. Although 5 minutes in my Font book, we probably would have found the next best free knockoff. There's superstitions in Hollywood, that projects succeed when certain people, actors, voices, music, fonts, are used.

We've bought a few fonts here and there when we were either trying to match something or going for a particular look and there were no close matches.

The history of font prices dates back to the days of typsetting machines that used pieces of film containing all the characters of a font, installed on rotating drums with lights inside the drum that projected that particular font/character onto a piece of film or photo paper.

In those days, a font could easily cost $300-500 for a single font; bold, italic, narrow, etc were all separate pieces of film that were purchased separately.
I think some type foundries are still of the opinion that they should be paid large sums of money for their fonts, and a lot of designers still do.

Of course, developing a new font that's of truly high quality, with all the individual ligatures (the way specific letter combinations fit together) and kerning rules (spacing between letters) is complicated business that takes a lot of time, so it is fair to pay a reasonable amount of money for a good font. I've found that the free imitations are never as good in terms of their kerning rules and ligatures, so the fonts never look quite as good when the type is actually set, but, sadly, it's also nearly impossible to find a good graphic designer that truly understands typography, at least for less than $75 or $100 per hour.

That was me in 1970 - working on the college daily newspaper with paper tape driven, flying font filmstrip typesetting machines. Oh that was a fun intro to Computers!

A few years later, when I did layout and design of political campaign literature, we bought LetraSet - sheets of transfer lettering. You had to buy that, because it's how you got type to paper.

I got my first Mac in 1985, and Adobe was selling fonts on floppy disc. Apple later incorporated/included much of that into the System, so the need diminished.

I have now a large Font book. The MTV fonts are some of my favs.

I very well may spend some money to buy certain fonts at some point. It's like finding a needle in a haystack, but there are some beautiful, well made fonts out there. Can turn an ordinary page into something attractive and appealing to read and give a fresh, current look - just from a font.

i almost did once, but then i just googled the fontname and found it for free on another site