The article suggests that tech companies believe brand is important, and therefore invest in building custom typefaces to save on licensing fees.
That doesn't really hold up. The cost of developing a custom typeface can easily run from hundreds of thousands into millions of dollars.
It can take a huge amount of time and energy from within the company to commission and direct a large creative project.
Typeface licensing costs are a very small proportion of what most companies will spend on brand marketing.
And saving money on a small line-item isn't exactly a recipe for getting promoted.
Announcing that your shiny new typeface will save the company lots of money is, more likely, a post-purchase rationalisation that helps make everyone feel good about the investment.
If the driver was primarily to reduce licensing costs, there are some great alternatives:
1. Use one of the many terrific free and open source typefaces that will cover all the languages and use cases you really need (like Noto or Open Sans). Or even better, system fonts.
2. Threaten to use a free alternative and then negotiate a better deal on licensing
3. Go ahead and use your favourite typeface without declaring the full usage so it is unlicensed or under-licensed. This saves a lot of money and is actually pretty common.
In the past I've interviewed designers and creative teams about how they choose and decide to license typefaces. They talk about things like:
* wanting to create exactly the right aesthetic for their brand (i.e. I can only be satisfied by something that doesn't yet exist)
* finding usage-based licensing complex as it creates non-financial costs in terms of understanding, tracking and justifying the licensing costs. That all gets much easier if you own the typeface.
* reducing the risk of inadvertent copyright infringement and subsequent reputational damage
* feeling in control by owning the IP (and therefore not dependent on any third party in future)
> That doesn't really hold up. The cost of developing a custom typeface can easily run from hundreds of thousands into millions of dollars.
No-one's arguing the up front investment in creating the font, but instead focusing on the "rent-seeking behaviour" that sees the recurring costs come in anywhere up to $1M a year. Some foundries charge you per pageview and per mobile app developer. There is a company/audience size at which keeping track of pageviews and seat count and paying hundreds of thousands of dollars or perhaps millions per year is significantly more trouble than the initial hurt of commissioning a typeface. At the end of the exercise you can wrap it up as a marketing or branding opportunity and generate a few hundred thousand pageviews and call it a day.
For that additional £20k in gross salary, your take home pay only increases by £8k, so the _marginal rate_ for each additional pound in that bracket is 60%.
Ok, but doing a rough calculation using https://goodcalculators.com/us-salary-tax-calculator/, you'd pay about the same percentage of tax in total from a 160k USD paycheck in California. So the level of tax is not radically different.
If you go up to 200k USD compared to 150k GBP, then you get to keep about 66% of it in California and about 60% in the UK. That's a difference that's quite easily lost in the noise when you consider differences in overall cost of living, healthcare, etc. etc.
I've found that Americans have a very fixed perception of America having low taxes and Europe having high taxes. But taxes in the UK are really not that much higher (except VAT in comparison to sales tax).
But taxes in the UK are really not that much higher (except VAT in comparison to sales tax).
Of course that depends a lot on which taxes you look at.
For total personal income taxes for an employee on salary, the highest marginal rate (ignoring the odd 60% band at £100k-120k) is currently 47%, and you reach that when your salary passes £150k.
If you go independent and start getting paid through a limited company and then paying yourself, the highest marginal tax rates are effectively about 50% if you pay out through dividends or 54% if you pay out through salary.
And then people wonder why we don't see more successful entrepreneurial types setting up new companies so they can take on bigger projects and create more jobs... I mean, who wouldn't want to pay thousands more in taxes for the same original revenue earned by their work, and take on a bunch of extra paperwork filing and other statutory obligations, while simultaneously losing out on a bunch of statutory employment rights and protections?
But at level you quite often get a jump over that - also at that level you can make full use of the various tax reduction perks.
Employee share saves, 20K ISA, Salary Sacrifice into pensions, EIS at up to 1,000,000 a year for 30% tax relief SEIS is 50% relief but only 150k a year oh and their is VCT another 200k per anum at 30%.
And you pay as much property tax as a lower middle class person does in the states.
This article is a badly assembled collection of other people's ideas. Taking most out of the content out of its original context is why it doesn't make much sense.
I agree. It seems very heavy on pictures, and light on explanations or reasoning for the rules given.
I find a much better resource is "Butterrick's Practical Typography"[0], which is a very accessible. If you want just the absolute bare essentials, the first section of the book/site "Typography in 10 Minutes"[1] is fantastic.
Not according to the American Marketing Association. Their definition - which is used as the textbook definition of marketing - goes like this:
"Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large."
Marketing is _not_ simply about communicating the value of products. Advertising something that doesn't help a customer create or experience value is not marketing.
I think you'd find this article and the comments interesting:
Oh my god! It's the same article and the same comments, just different words are used. Being Seth Goddin surely helps in getting the point across though...
When you change the style of an element, like a paragraph, it works like CSS and applies the change to all elements of that type. To add specificity, you have to give an element a class.
I completely agree. Being able to hand-code doesn't mean it's always the easiest way to develop an idea.
And well done guys. Getting this far in 7 months is very impressive.
Having been part of the team that designed and built Typecast (http://typecast.com), it took us over a year to really get somewhere. Building browser-based design tools is way harder than it looks.
That's not really what responsive design means at all. And I don't find your comment particularly constructive.
Useful content is essential. But responsive design is about making that content readable, accessible and hopefully attractive to the reader no matter what the device they're using to consume it.
It has nothing to do with "pretty" layouts and everything to do with the web's fundamental principle of universality.
And - by the way - many people do care how something looks, especially on mobile. Just because a site has good content doesn't mean it shouldn't be easy to read.
>everything to do with the web's fundamental principle of universality.
Precisely everything that anyone who doesn't have JS capability or perhaps an older or less capable browser (whatever reason they still have one) is denied. The readability, accessibility and attractiveness you value often have the NASA predicament : Faster, Better, Cheaper... pick "2".
Have you tried browsing your site on an older Nokia?
That doesn't really hold up. The cost of developing a custom typeface can easily run from hundreds of thousands into millions of dollars.
It can take a huge amount of time and energy from within the company to commission and direct a large creative project.
Typeface licensing costs are a very small proportion of what most companies will spend on brand marketing.
And saving money on a small line-item isn't exactly a recipe for getting promoted.
Announcing that your shiny new typeface will save the company lots of money is, more likely, a post-purchase rationalisation that helps make everyone feel good about the investment.
If the driver was primarily to reduce licensing costs, there are some great alternatives:
1. Use one of the many terrific free and open source typefaces that will cover all the languages and use cases you really need (like Noto or Open Sans). Or even better, system fonts.
Jeremiah Shoaf has a terrific curated list here: https://www.typewolf.com/google-fonts
2. Threaten to use a free alternative and then negotiate a better deal on licensing
3. Go ahead and use your favourite typeface without declaring the full usage so it is unlicensed or under-licensed. This saves a lot of money and is actually pretty common.
In the past I've interviewed designers and creative teams about how they choose and decide to license typefaces. They talk about things like:
* wanting to create exactly the right aesthetic for their brand (i.e. I can only be satisfied by something that doesn't yet exist)
* finding usage-based licensing complex as it creates non-financial costs in terms of understanding, tracking and justifying the licensing costs. That all gets much easier if you own the typeface.
* reducing the risk of inadvertent copyright infringement and subsequent reputational damage
* feeling in control by owning the IP (and therefore not dependent on any third party in future)