#FONTSTAND DOWNLOAD FREE#
‘I created an assignment that was made to fit the platform’s one-hour free test option. ‘Fontstand is a very useful tool for graphic design students to get immediate access to many high-quality fonts,’ says Bergerhausen. Johannes Bergerhausen, professor at the University of Applied Sciences Mainz, used the free test feature as an inspirational constraint. And at the time of writing, 51 quality-conscious, independent foundries have joined Fontstand, offering 1374 families, and the number is growing.įrom the outset, art and design schools found smart ways to use the Fontstand system in their typography courses. Fontstand’s carefully curated selection of individual foundries and type designers also represents a smart alternative to the endless hypermarket (of increasingly mediocre typefaces) that major platforms have become, most of which are now owned by Monotype.īiľak says: ‘When we started we didn’t have a target … we simply thought it was the right time.’ They now have more than 33,000 registered users.
If a project or publication is granted a longer life or gradually grows, the monthly lease can be converted into a permanent licence – after twelve months the font can be kept and used forever. A typeface, or a complete family of faces, can be rented for a month at ten per cent of purchase price for many one-off projects, one or two months is sufficient. Fontstand’s most innovative feature is the leasing system. Crucially, it is possible to ‘borrow’ a font for an hour to do a realistic test, even printing it out, instead of relying on the frustrating guess that is a pure screen test – and the loan is free. Its unique selling proposition is its method of presenting, leasing and selling digital type. Could this be a gateway to a brighter typographic future for students?įontstand was launched in the spring of 2015 by Peter Biľak, owner of the Typotheque foundry in the Netherlands, with friends from his native Slovakia. Fontstand, a Dutch-Slovakian distribution network, is now coming to the rescue with an educational font licensing programme. Online sources of information are often purely commercial or downright unreliable, and while there are dozens, maybe hundreds of micro-foundries with well made websites, young graphic designers and students have trouble finding their way through the forest of fonts. Budding graphic designers have a hard time exploring the type market today.