Take a letter: new digital font-delivery options

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Dec 15, 1994 by Debby Patz

Typeface distribution has come far in a short time. The diskette-by-mail route has already been superseded by CD-ROM type catalogs, CompuServe's DTP Online, and now ITC Design Palette. Response to the new delivery options has been enthusiastic--especially since they can ease that night-before-a-ship-date panic to find just the right headline font.

Fonts on CD-ROM

CD-ROM catalogs are "becoming the way our end-users are purchasing fonts," says Paul Pegnato, channel manager at Monotype Typography, Inc., in Chicago. After paying $49.95 for the disc, users fax in orders to Monotype. The font house returns a decryption code (for an additional $22.50), which lets the new licensee "unlock" and download the usable font.

One big limitation to the service is the speed of response: Notes Leonard Bergson, owner of rhinoType service bureau in New York City, "With a CD-ROM you get the sense that it's a 24-hour-a-day service, but it's not."

Access anytime

Year-old DTP Online was set up to address the issue of 24-hour access. With search functions similar to those of CD-ROM catalogs, DTP Online's key is accessibility; fonts can be downloaded (at three to four minutes for a set of four), day or night. Says Joe Treacy, president of Treacy-facesHeadliners in West Haven, Connecticut, whose company has been online since May, "Sales are on a par with half of our regular distributors, and markedly better than others."

But sales orders numbering only in the hundreds are not what the service's originators had hoped for, says Don Arnoldy, DTP Online's Santa Clara, California-based general manager. Arnoldy likens his service to Adobe's Type On Call (TOC). But instead of entering a card number with every order, as TOC users must, DTP Online orders are billed directly to the user's Compu-Serve account.

As Fairfield, Connecticut-based FontHaus discovered, the licensing system isn't foolproof. A teenager logging in from Canada placed a major order, and FontHaus found itself out thousands of dollars. In October, FontHaus removed its font library from DTP Online, but left its smaller (i.e., cheaper) ArtParts clipart collection "as a gesture of good faith," says general manager Andrew Schwartz.

The FontHaus incident has not scared other vendors away. Treacy will increase the number of his fonts on DTP Online from 160 to 250. In November, Monotype put on 120 individual fonts and plans to add more. "I'm not worried about [credit problems]," says Pegnato, whose entry will mark DTP Online's first Windows font collection. "Online is going to become the primary way of doing business." Even Schwartz admits that "we certainly see a need for electronic delivery." So FontHaus has made plans to go online with its own FontHaus bulletin board in mid-1995.

ITC introduces new solution

To address users' access and providers' payment problems, New York City's International Typeface Corporation is unveiling ITC Design Palette. To be released this month, Design Palette combines elements of both delivery systems. Users browse CD-ROMs, but click on a "buy" prompt instead of faxing orders to the font owner. The CD-ROM reader alerts a desktop unit, which logs and decrypts the order immediately. Later, the box--connected by SCSI cable to the CD-ROM reader and by modem to ITC--is polled and orders are recorded. Users receive a monthly bill.

Debuting with 5,800 typefaces from 17 vendors, Design Palette also contains clip art, stock photos, Quark XTensions and Adobe Utilities. But Design Palette's pricing--a $250 minimum monthly purchase requirement--may be its Achilles' heel. "[I wonder] how many companies are going to bite for that," says Treacy.

In contrast, DTP Online fonts cost from $14.95 to $49--less than their price on disk because users provide their own storage. (Although there is no minimum purchase requirement, the user does need a CompuServe account, which costs $8.95 per month. DTP Online, an "extended service," costs an additional $6 per online hour.)

But the lower prices of its CD-ROM and online competitors do not concern ITC Design Palette project manager Jeremy Allen. "Fonts are not the key to this system," he says, "photographic images are."

In fact, Allen sees his real competition as online photo suppliers Seymour from PNI and the Kodak Picture Exchange. "For someone who buys stock photography," he says, "$250 [a month] is nothing."

Yet Design Palette beta tester Margaret Wolf, senior designer at Warner Books in New York City, says she does not reach that amount most months. As a concession to smaller magazines and design firms, ITC offers users the alternative of paying $50 a month for the box and CD-ROMs with no minimum purchase obligation.

An end to piracy?

For all Design Palette's fancy aspirations, the driving force behind its creation was the desire to stem font piracy. "ITC became interested in this project because it was seen as a way to encourage users to legitimize their type," says Allen. While illegal font duplication is a widespread problem for font foundries, industry efforts have led to increased awareness among users of licensing restrictions.