From the course: Font Management Essential Training

Subscribing to font libraries

From the course: Font Management Essential Training

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Subscribing to font libraries

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- [Instructor] So far we've looked at several ways to get fonts permanently on your computer by purchasing them or finding sources of free fonts. But nowadays you have another option and that's to subscribe to libraries of fonts rather than purchasing them. The benefit is that you get access to many commercial quality fonts without having to spend a lot of money. The downside, of course, is when your subscription ends, so does your access to the fonts. So let's check out a few options for subscribing to font libraries. The first one we'll consider is Typekit by Adobe. Typekit was founded in 2008 and acquired by Adobe in 2011 and is now offered as one of the services that come with a Creative Cloud subscription. Typekit fonts are available both as web fonts and desktop fonts. Once you're logged in with your Adobe ID, you can browse Typekit fonts, preview the fonts in tiles or rows, you can change the preview text, and click on a font to see its weights and styles. You can scale these specimens. And edit the specimen text. You can also click details and find out a lot more about the font. And you can see its licensing availability. So I can see that with a paid plan, like a Creative Cloud subscription, I can sync all six Granville fonts here for use in my desktop apps and they're also available as web fonts. I'll go back in my browser. And notice that you can use the buttons on the right to filter fonts by classification, recommended use, properties, things like x height, and so on. So with these criteria, I've narrowed the list down to one specific font, Futura. And there are also filters for language and script support down here at the bottom. I'll turn off these filters to see all my fonts again. Note that you can show and hide the filters and you can also show or hide web only families. And if you scroll to the bottom of the window, you can browse by designer. And note that the A to Z list is arranged alphabetically by first name, which is a little weird. And I can click on a name to see that designer's bio and their fonts. I'll scroll to the bottom again where I can browse by foundry. And there are also lists of fonts and these are curated by Adobe, like this one, Alternatives to Helvetica, for when you're getting pretty tired of Helvetica and want a good replacement. And finally, if you click the discover button, you can access the visual search tools where you can upload a photo of some type that you like and find the nearest matches in the Typekit library. Note that when you sync a font from Typekit, you can't see it on your machine because it's placed in a hidden directory, but the real font is installed so you don't need internet access to use it as long as your Typekit subscription is active. And if you check out the plans page, you can see the various subscription options. Another service that allows syncing of fonts to your desktop is the Monotype library subscription service, available at fonts.com. The basic plan is currently 15 dollars a month or 10 dollars a month if you subscribe for a year and it gives you access to over 2,200 font families from Monotype, Linotype, ITC, and other foundries. And you can see this includes some really classic fonts. The Monotype service uses a desktop app called SkyFonts to download and manage fonts. Just like with Typekit, after you've downloaded the fonts you want, they work just as if you purchased them and you don't need internet access to use them and the Monotype service also includes the ability to download and sync fonts to two different machines so you could have the same fonts on a desktop machine and a laptop. So in this movie, we looked at two options for subscription access to fonts, Typekit by Adobe and the Monotype library subscription service. So if you need some high quality fonts and you don't want to purchase them, a subscription might be the right thing for you.

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