#FONTSTAND FOR MAC OS#
#FONTSTAND FREE#
#FONTSTAND WINDOWS#

It’s fun to get your type from Fontstand. They brought Bilak’s former student Ondrej Jób to work on the interface and develop it into the gorgeous app it is today. “Andrej asked me what I thought about doing the same with fonts-making them available on reduced time-basis,” he explains. Previously, Bilak had experience rethinking content distribution with his excellent design magazine, Works That Work. Two years ago, Peter Bilak of Typotheque in The Netherlands teamed up with longtime friend and designer Andrej Krátky to work on a new business model for selling type. And any font you rent for 12 months is yours to keep. You can even share a font with a friend for an incremental increase in the rental fee. Or rent the entire family for the limited time you might need it for a one-off job, saving hundreds of dollars. Now, instead of buying a complete font family, you can rent, say, just the extra bold italic if that’s all you need.

#FONTSTAND FOR MAC OS#

So when I saw Fontstand, a high-end, try-before-you-buy font service introduced on Twitter at the end of May, I enthusiastically clicked right in.įontstand is an elegant and colorful standalone app for Mac OS that seamlessly allows you to browse, try, and rent carefully crafted typefaces from type designers and independent foundries of the highest caliber. With new streaming music and video apps popping up left and right and software-as-service coming to giants like Adobe’s Creative Cloud, it’s no surprise that having a collection of fonts collecting dust in your hard drive feels just as dated as flipping through a shelf of CDs. We may not quite be in a sharing economy yet, but we’re certainly in a “not owning” economy. In the meantime, it’s intriguing enough to find new wingdings.Some of the foundries you’ll find on offer at Fontstand It will be intriguing to revisit Fontstand in a few months and see what the user data is suggesting about modern readers. Any time an otherwise opaque industry can put its product in the hands of users and let them have at it, they gain meaningful insights.

#FONTSTAND FREE#

The free hour functionality of Fontstand also allows users to play in the sandbox. In fact, choice is sort of the fundamental core of design so more choice will almost necessarily lead to better results. Sure, there will be a lot of bad options as Fontstand expands, but the choice is a virtue in design. The specific reason why the new system is awesome is that it paves the way for independent font designers to make a living in the same way independent app developers currently do.

An industry that hasn’t changed a whole lot since Gutenberg tearing it up in the Electorate of Mainz is adopting a model that facilitates beta testing. Whether or not we’re due for a proliferation of fonts - mobile reading may dampen publishers’ enthusiasm - it’s nice to see design made accessible in a sustainable, mass market way. The system is smooth and functional and makes about 100 percent more sense than the old system of negotiating permanent access to fonts.

#FONTSTAND WINDOWS#

The new app Fontstand (exclusively available for Windows OS X) allows users to test drive letterforms from major foundries and rent what they need.