Fontstand Blog

Fontstand has introduced an innovative iPad app that lets users explore, filter, manage and use its extensive library of professional-quality fonts. Since iPadOS now supports custom fonts, Fontstand is expanding its MacOS and Windows font rental system, allowing a growing number of compatible iPad applications (including Apple’s own Keynote, Pages and Numbers, as well as Adobe’s Photoshop) to access 15,000+ fonts from 50 renowned independent foundries.

“There are three times as many active iPad users as there are desktop Mac users. Fontstand’s ambition has always been to introduce professional-quality typefaces to new audiences, and supporting iPadOS lets us reach many people who have never licensed fonts before,” says Fontstand co-founder Peter Biľak.

In 2015 Fontstand revolutionized font licensing by offering short-term font rentals at attractive prices. With one click, users can rent fully functional fonts for 30 days at 10% of their normal retail price. Founded by active type designers, the company aims to benefit both font foundries and end users, expanding the market for high-quality, legally licensed typefaces.

The application is free to download via the App Store. Users who rent fonts via the Fontstand desktop app for Mac or Windows will find those same fonts available on their iPads at no extra cost. Fontstand also offers a $4.99 iPad-only monthly subscription that gives access to its library of over 1600 font families supporting hundreds of languages from Abaza to Zulu. With so many fonts to choose from, users will be glad to know that the iPad app offers the same search function as its desktop counterparts, so fonts can be filtered not only by traditional categories (serif, sans serif, slab, script, display, etc.), but also by visual attributes such as width, x-height and stroke contrast, as well as OpenType feature support and language support.

Co-founder Andrej Krátky adds: “We imagine that creative professionals and design enthusiasts will take advantage of the advanced possibilities of iPad to create their presentations, documents and graphics directly on the tablet, without the need to migrate projects across platforms.”

As the coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to spread and the situation evolves we have no other choice but to announce that the 2020 Fontstand Conference in Dublin is cancelled.

Fontstand’s priority is to keep the delegates, speakers, and our partners safe, and to prevent the spread of the virus we have made the decision to cancel this years’ conference. We considered postponing it to a later date in 2020, however, with no clear outlook it is not responsible to move to a date when we can’t guarantee safety of the attendants.

We will be issuing full refund of all purchased tickets in the coming weeks.

On Saturday, May 25, 2019 the second Fontstand conference took place in Porto, Portugal. Taking place one day before the European elections, it couldn’t have felt more international, more like a celebration of diversity and community. Occasionally, the type and design scene can feel quite US-centric, but not at this event. Each speaker seemed to speak a different flavor of English and some of the 200 people in the audience had traveled from as far away as Australia, Brazil or the west coast of Canada.

While the first Fontstand conference in 2018 came about as a foundry meeting first and conference second, this time the conference part was planned from the outset, largely organized by local type designer Dino de Santos (DS Type) and Fontstand’s Andrej Krátky and Peter Biľak. The theater-like Ateneu Commercial do Porto in the city center provided a charming backdrop — even winning this year’s conference-chandelier rating — and space for the packed program of 13 stage presentations and 13 interspersed “Tiny Talks” (one slide, 5 minutes).

The prevalent motif of the presentations was true “behind the scenes” insight into the work and lives of type designers and independent businesses, touching, among other things, on the discomfort of giving up design control with variable fonts, the less glorious parts of running a type business, font licensing, finding inspiration for your work amongst seemingly dead ends, developing your own tools to explore new creative directions, designing for different writing systems and matching different scripts, but all livened up by the zippy 5-minute talks in between that went as far as to propose eliminating all letters with diagonals from the alphabet.

Some may have found so many presentation on type design quite geeky; to others it was a welcomed difference to other conferences that focus more on general graphic design or on academic research. Either way, events like these — still small and casual enough — provide a rare chance for real conversations between (typo-)graphic designers, students and type makers and sellers, something we should maybe encourage and facilitate even more. Coffee and lunch breaks gave some time to chat and mingle, but were kept brief in favor of the dense program. We’re curious to hear the opinion of attendees on that: Do you prefer fewer talks and more breaks? A slightly higher ticket price to cover a simple catered lunch so we can stay together at the venue and talk more? Or maybe even a two-day event?

While the public conference part lasted for one day only, it was a multi-day event for the foundry partners. On Sunday we met to discuss foundries’ and Fontstand’s experiences of the past year, new ideas and new locations. Several more partners attended who couldn’t make it in 2018, so the event was also a great opportunity to get to know each other better and exchange views with far-flung colleagues. Where else do you otherwise see 30+ independent type foundries in one room talking to each other, and above all, in good spirits?

Too short a meeting almost, despite Dino having set up a great full-day program including a beach café lunch and port wine tasting. We hope to keep the conversation going during the months until the next event. Do let us know if you want to comment on anything regarding the conference, its location or Fontstand in general. We want it to be the most varied and friendly place to look for and hear about typefaces.

Today’s design students are tomorrow’s design professionals, and they need to train with professional design tools, including high-quality digital typefaces. Many schools, however, find it difficult to give their students access to professional-quality type.

In the days when the “notebooks” that most students carried were three-ring binders, schools had computer labs where students could work with fonts licensed for use on school equipment, an arrangement that was hardly cheap, but at least centralized and manageable. Today, more and more students are doing more and more of their work on their own laptops, but few can afford to maintain a broad library of high-quality, legally licensed typefaces, and fewer still can justify the purchase of a font that will be used for a single project and may never be needed again. The average foundry, on the other hand, is unlikely to agree to let schools install its fonts on thousands of student computers when there’s no practical way to guarantee that the files won’t be kept and/or redistributed, even long after the students graduate.

Enter Fontstand, the company that pioneered technical solutions to make font licensing affordable for users and profitable for independent foundries. The same monthly rental system now used by thousands of small- and medium-sized design studios is now being made available for educational institutions at a special price. Regular users of Fontstand’s Mac and Windows desktop applications can try fonts for free and rent them for just 10% of their retail price per month, and now students at participating design schools and colleges will be able to rent them for just half that, as Fontstand will forego its share of the license fee (effectively donating it to the school) while ensuring that the foundries still receive their royalties in full.

How it works: participating design schools and colleges can set their font budgets and specify a number of students. Each student will then receive a voucher for his or her share of the budget, gaining access to Fontstand’s growing library of top-quality type families. Schools get a convenient, affordable font licensing solution, students get to work with professional-quality tools on their own computers, and foundries and type designers get full payment for their work, a win-win-win situation.

The type designer and partner at the Process Type Foundry heads to Chicago for the second event in our Font Faces series.

Fontstand partnered with the The Society of Typographic Arts in Chicago to curate the Font Faces type lecture series which started with James Edmondson of Oh No Type Foundry last October. The next event will be held on Thursday, June 28, and will welcome Nicole Dotin of Process Type Foundry, an independent type design studio based in Minneapolis.

Nicole will be talking about finding her way into type design and what it looks like to run type foundry today. By discussing her design process, she hopes to demystify the creation of new typefaces and type design in general. Lastly, she'll talk about Alphacrit, a new initiative she started through the Alphabettes that aims to connect aspiring and professional type designers.

Article by Catherine Dixon

A meeting of 20 Fontstand foundries from 12 countries in Zagreb, capital city of Croatia, was the quite wonderful answer to the question of how best to find out what Fontstand’s partners and collaborators are really thinking about current industry challenges.

This more human-centred approach to business communication in turn prompted the further question of whether everyone would actually be able to come. Yet acceptance of the invitation to meet together for a weekend was so overwhelmingly positive it soon became incumbent upon the organizers to try to share the benefits of this gathering of visiting designers with the local design community.

And so grew the idea for the very first Fontstand conference. A packed and fast-moving day of 13 talks given by type designers and typographers from around the world, and followed by a panel discussion featuring Croatian design, was warmly received by more than 100 attendees from as far afield as Japan and the United States. The themes explored were substantive and included the design of custom typefaces to enhance complex typographic layout; innovations in variable fonts for editorial design; contemporary challenges to conservatism in the design of complex scripts such as Hangul and Arabic; and the possibilities for maintaining both quality and quirky invention in the stylistic minefield of corporate font design. Yet, if the content was serious, the mood was light. Newcomers to the world of fonts were drawn in as old friends made new friends, and all in conference surroundings more open and joyful than most.

The public-facing Saturday conference was then followed by a more relaxed and private Sunday for Fontstand foundry partners to talk through plans for the future, and simply enjoy each other’s company. And as if there hadn’t already been good times enough, a coach trip to the family vineyard of type designer Nikola Djurek brought with it sparkling sunshine, fine wine and the most generous of experiences one could hope to be a part of.

Fontstand partnered with The Society of Typographic Arts (STA) in Chicago to organise a regular series of lectures on type design and typography.

STA was established in 1927, Chicago’s oldest professional design organization, promoting high standards and focus on the art and craft of typography, design, and visual communication. Fontstand, a typeface discovery tool, partnered with STA to curate a new lecture series program to bring inspirational type designers to Chicago.

The first in the series is James Edmondson of OH no Type Foundry, a chill, San Francisco-based type designer that reinvents expressive under-appreciated genres of type design. Save the date, Tuesday October 24, 6pm, at Leo Burnett. Get your tickets here. As a bonus, James will conduct a Type & Lettering Crit the following night. Don't miss this amazing opportunity.

When we founded Fontstand we chose the path of carefully curated growth, partnering with foundries whose work we admire, and it’s been amazing to watch the collection of available fonts grow organically as the foundries add new releases. With ever more fonts to choose from (as of this writing, Fontstand offers 1,166 complete type families), part of our job is to find new ways to help you discover them, and perhaps there is no better way than to see them used in context. That’s why we are delighted to announce that we are working with Fonts In Use, a public archive of applied typography.

When you upgrade to the latest version of the Fontstand app (v. 1.4.5 and higher) you will see a new section named Discover, under which you can find the Fonts In Use gallery. Browse by images that interest you, or filter samples by categories such as format (advertising, books, branding, poster, web…), industry (automotive, fashion, politics, science…) or type foundry (45 and counting). When you find an interesting sample you can click on it for more information, including the font names and project details.

Fontstand webfonts can be used on any website, including the online content management systems (CMS), such as WordPress or Squarespace. This tutorial shows you simple step-by-step guidelines on how to implement the webfonts on your website.

Please read our Fontstand webfonts easy tutorial first for basic info about generating your Fontstand webfont CSS code. The code consists of two parts: the URL <link> to be placed in your page's head section, and a set of CSS rules for referencing to specific fonts.

WordPress

By default, your WordPress site will be configured using some basic Themes from the start. You can also update your web page with any of the thousands of free or commercially available themes and each of them will have a slightly different structure. But these basic steps should help you to replace the default fonts with your Fontstand rental webfonts in most cases. When possible, try to refer to your themes developer documentation for any theme-specific info.

Log into your WordPress admin area, in the left hand side menu, click Appearance and then Editor. If you have more than one theme installed, Select theme to edit using the selector on the right hand side of the main window and click Select.

In the list of files under the theme selector look for the Theme Header (header.php) and choose it from the list.

Paste the <link> part of the CSS code somewhere between the existing <head></head> tags in the editor window. The code will look like this:

<head> <link  rel="stylesheet"  href="https://webfonts.fontstand.com/WF-xxxxxx-xxxxxx.css"  type="text/css”> </head>

Click Update File.

Find and select the Stylesheet (style.php) file from the right hand list.

Look for the font definitions you want to replace with the Fontstand webfont. It will contain the font-family property followed by the default font name. Insert the Fontstand font name found in your CSS code just after the font-family tag, leaving the original font definition as a fallback. For instance, the original definition:

font-family: “Helvetica Neue”, sans-serif;

will become:

font-family: “Fontstand Font Name”, “Helvetica Neue”, sans-serif;

You may also need to replace the font-weight and font-style definitions with the default values for Fontstand webfonts:

font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;

To modify your styles to target specific elements of your website you may need to change the structure of the original CSS definition so that each font-weight and font-style is defined separately.

Squarespace (thanks to Mate Varadi for valuable info)

Sign in to your Squarespace account.

Click Settings then Advanced.

Choose Code Injection.

Paste the <link> part of the CSS code under Header. The code will look like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://webfonts.fontstand.com/WF-xxxxxx-xxxxxx.css" type="text/css">

Click Update File.

Click Save.

Return to your site by clicking the back arrow.

Click Design then Custom CSS.

Paste the second part of the Fontstand CSS code into the editor window. Now replace the element description with any other selector to use the given font. Each Squarespace template uses different classes and conventions, so it is best to use a tool such as Chrome Developer Tools or Firebug to inspect the elements on the page. For example, if you want all of your headers, the body text and paragraphs to render in the Fontstand font, your CSS would look like this:

h1, h2, h3, h4, body, p{ font-family: “Fontstand Font Name”; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; }

Click Save.

How exactly can I generate Fontstand webfonts?

After you start a rental (or a free trial) of a font with the Desktop & Web option, you can activate your webfonts in 4 simple steps:

Go to the Webfonts section of the Fontstand app and using the drop-down menu Add Font (or multiple fonts) to the list of your webfonts.

Specify the Domain Address to be active for all your webfonts.

Select any number of available fonts from the list by clicking the small check-box and click the Get CSS Code button.

Copy and paste the resulting CSS code into your web project.

Please make sure you define all domains and subdomains that you use, for example mysite.com and also blog.mysite.com or mysite.net. Webfonts will function only on the defined domains.

Implementing webfonts on your site is easy.

The resulting CSS code displayed in the Fontstand app consists of two parts.

Your custom key is embedded inside the first block of the CSS code, and just needs to be pasted between the <head></head> tags of your web project.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://webfonts.fontstand.com/WF-xxxxxx-xxxxxx.css" type="text/css">

You can now define which parts of the text will use the custom fonts. Use the second part of the generated code to reference the desired font, which looks like this:

element { /* replace with your selector */ font-family: “Xxxxx Xxxxx”; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; }

You can replace the element description with any other selector; in our example we would like to define the paragraph <p>. The resulting code will look like this:

p { font-family: “Xxxxx Xxxxx”; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; }

Next you will need to put some text between the <p></p> paragraph tags:

<p> Fontstand One-Click Font Rental </p>

And the complete html code example will look like this:

<html> <head> <title>Web Fonts Tutorial</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://webfonts.fontstand.com/WF-xxxxxx-xxxxxx.css" type="text/css"/> <style type="text/css"> p { font-family: “Xxxxx Xxxxx”; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; } </style> </head> <body> <p> Fontstand One-Click Font Rental </p> </body> </html>

Don’t forget to click your browser’s refresh button. Voilà, you are ready to start using Fontstand webfonts!

Using font stacks.

The font-family property can hold several font names as a “fallback” system. If the browser does not support webfont embedding, it tries the next font. Start the list with the font you want and end with a generic family to let the browser pick a similar font if no other fonts are available. If the name of a font family is more than one word, it must be in double quotation marks, for example: font-family: “Times New Roman”. More than one font family is specified in a comma-separated list. Example:

p { font-family: “Xxxxx Xxxxx”, "Lucida Sans", sans-serif; }

You can find further information on using CSS font-family property at w3schools.com.

Updating the list of defined domains.

Even after you have implemented the CSS code into your web project you can still update the list of domains for a specific range of selected fonts. Just open the Webfonts view on the Fontstand app, add a new Domain Address and re-generate your webfonts. To do so, you only need to select the exact same fonts you have used in the previously generated CSS and click the Get CSS Code button.

In the scant year and a half since Fontstand was launched it has built a significant user base and brought together the world’s best independent type foundries. We are pleased to announce a major update, version 1.3, adding hosted webfonts to its popular desktop font rental service.

Fontstand was developed solely by independent type designers as a way to give you access to the world’s best fonts, letting you try them for free and rent them by the month for a fraction of the retail price.

Almost from Fontstand’s launch, users have been asking about the possibility of using rented fonts online, and we are pleased to announce that starting today, the majority of the fonts on Fontstand are available as hosted webfonts. Every monthly rental includes up to 10,000 page views (trackable in the application itself), and you can get additional packages of 100,000 page views at just 2% of the regular retail price.

Behind Fontstand’s simple, intuitive interface is a complex cloud-based service that automatically manages all the font files, generates webfonts and CSS codes, and keeps track of the webfont use. Just as users who rent a font for 12 months receive a regular permanent desktop license, they also receive a license to use webfonts free of charge for up to 10,000 page views per month forever.

Personal Recommendation Program

With the thousands of fonts available on Fontstand, typeface recommendations from friends and colleagues have become an important reference for many users. Fontstand now lets you send personal recommendations via email, social media or web. If your friend uses the link to rent the font within 30 days, you will receive Fontstand credit in the amount of 10% of the rental (taken out of Fontstand’s commission; the foundry still receives full royalties for its work).

Fontstand: try and rent the best fonts for print & web.

Peter Biľak & Andrej Krátky,

founders of Fontstand

For nearly a year now, Fontstand has been bringing high-quality desktop fonts at a reasonable price to both professional and casual users, many of whom would have balked at the cost of a regular license.

Although many Fontstand users are working in high-end computer graphics applications, many also use mobile devices, which are becoming increasingly important not only for content consumption, but also for content creation. Retina-quality resolution has brought the fine details of typography to even these smaller displays, while faster, more powerful processors have made it common to run presentations directly from an iPhone or iPad. Of course, word processing, spreadsheet and graphics apps also benefit from having great fonts available in the iOS system menu.

Today we are happy to launch Fontstand for iOS — the simple way to use your font rentals on your mobile devices.

Fontstand for iOS is a standalone app that makes it easy to synchronize your Fontstand for Mac OS X font trials and rentals for use on your iPhone or iPad. If you don’t already have a Fontstand user account, the first step is to install Fontstand for Mac OS X (available as a free download from fontstand.com) and use it to create an account and start font rentals or trials.

To use your rentals and trials on your iPad or iPhone, download Fontstand for iOS from the app store and log in to access your list of active fonts. Select the fonts you want to use in your apps, tap the Install option, then enter your iOS password and follow the step-by-step instructions. Then just start the app you want to use, and get to work (or play)!