With the introduction of the MLS, some argue, the market has hit rock bottom. Quite understandably, this has been criticised as a race to the bottom. 40% of €/$ 10 is €/$ 4, which does not even buy you decent lunch in some parts of the world. In some extreme cases, entire typeface families were sold for a tenner. ² In the last few years, some designers have tried to increase their income by giving steep discounts of 90% and more, hoping that a higher number of customers would compensate for the lower amount each customer pays. Not that much for something you worked on for a couple of months. Even before MLS launched, this had something to do with royalty rates, in other words: How much of the price of each licence of a font family ends up on the designer’s bank account? This ranges from 100% – for fonts bought directly from the designer – to as low as 40%, depending on the reseller. And most type designers have not gotten rich in doing so. Many type designers can easily spend one day on shaping one single letter. At the end of that day, not even one weight will be finished in most cases. Everyone who is remotely familiar with type design knows that a typeface family is not finished in one day. I have not included Dolly from Underware because it is not part of the MLS (but it is nice, as you probably already knew).įor type designers, by contrast, the deal is much less appealing. Here are samples of the typefaces I have mentioned in the last paragraph. For Greek, Cyrillic or Arabic, not so much. It helps, by the way, if you only need to use Latin-based alphabets: For those, the language support of most typefaces is good. That may be less of a concern for those interested in subdued text typography: MLS includes a number of modern classics that have aged with grace and can still be used nicely (such as Caecilia), along with some good recent releases (such as Quire Sans). In that industry, Rockwell (released in 1934 and based on earlier models) probably won’t count as ‘attention grabbing’ any more and Oranda (from the mid-80s) does not qualify as ‘unique’.

This may be a deal breaker for all those who are trying to produce fresh or even innovative work. Let’s be clear, though, that most of what you get is hardly at the cutting edge of contemporary type design. The choice seems ample: The library, Monotype says, features “reliable workhorses” (such as Avenir Next), “unique choices” (such as Ginkgo, Linotype’s take on the Dolly genre) and “attention grabbing” typefaces (such as Balega).

A regular licence of most typeface families available through the MLS would cost twenty times as much or more.

€/$ 14.99 per month for high-quality typefaces is next to nothing. The fonts can be used in desktop applications, but – unlike the fonts on Typekit, a competing service by Adobe – not on websites.įor graphic designers, this sounds like a good deal. The price tag is at no more than €/$ 14.99 per month (or €/$ 119.99 per year). Launched a few days ago, MLS is a subscription-based service that gives members access to “more than 9,000 fonts (2,200 font families)” (Monotype says). The abbreviation stands for Monotype Library Subscription. That’s not the name of a tropical disease or some obscure government agency.

Momotype subscription