Why the Helvetica Do Fonts Cost $40 Each (And What Does That Even Buy)?

I know that designing a typeface is no trivial pursuit. I’ve tried it. It was really, really hard. But in spite of that, it’s always seemed unreasonable to me that to use a new font, you often have to purchase it for upwards of 40 dollars. And you don’t even get it in Bold.

But once you have a font on your computer, you can use it for anything, right? Well, it depends. Sometimes that $40 only gives you the right to display the font on your screen and print it out. Can you use it in an image on the web? Sure, unless maybe you can’t. I don’t know. How can they even prove you used their font, though? A lot of them look really similar. What are these things legally protected by, anyway?

Both the exorbitant prices and confusing legal situation make it difficult for anyone but professional graphic designers and/or established companies that employ them to use a particularly wide variety of fonts. The web, however, has given almost everyone who can read a CSS tutorial the ability to be a graphic designer, but for a long time font licensing has stood in the way of using anything but nine free(-ish) fonts that everyone (maybe) has on their computer. Fortunately, this situation is being rectified; soon you’ll be able to pay $78467 to license a font for web use, once they’ve figured out how to deal with “illegal uses”. Whatever the method of preventing these illegal uses may be, some 16-year-old kid in Bangladesh has already cracked it.

But seriously, 40 dollars? For a font? And then maybe I can’t even show anyone what I do with it? Again, I know making fonts is hard work, but are they really that valuable? Especially if it’s the sort of font you use for one small project and then never need again. These prices might have made sense when fonts were the sort of thing that you’d take out of a box and arrange on your printing press, but that’s just not how things work anymore.

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