Most upvoted comment
YKS There are fonts designed specifically for dyslexics – this is mine.(r/YouShouldKnow)
Cannot tell if serious, but if you are, here’s why it’s legitimate to charge for typography:
FontLab Studio, what most professionals use (it’s the Photoshop of type design) is $649. While there are plenty of amateurs who sketch something out in a free app and put it online, and that might be good enough for mucking about with, a professional font family will take a designer months to complete. Kerning alone – the spacing between characters – requires considering and testing hundreds or thousands of possible character-pairs. Professional type design requires an advanced knowledge of geometry and principles of typography. Typography is an extremely specialized skill set which very few have and fewer places teach.
Dafont is definitely a great way for amateur typographers to share their experiments but an extremely small percentage of the fonts you’ll find there are professional-grade – try using them in a publication and you’ll find the lack of typefaces available in a family, the kerning, the smoothing, the lack of complete character sets (I need a tilde that matches, stat!) and the uneven strokes are going to screw you over.
A good analogy that may help: Flickr has an advanced search option to only search for Creative Commons-licensed photos. So why haven’t Getty and Corbis and Veer and iStockPhoto and all the other stock photo companies gone out of business? And why do photographers choose to sell their photos – instead of licensing all their work for free?
I’m just saying, this font took corbs hours – he has every right to name a price for it, regardless of how “helpful” his font is. Trust me, I feel the same frustration when I find the perfect photo for the mag layout I’m working on and find out they want $800 to license it…why can’t it be Creative Commons?!
EDIT: Hey, thanks /r/bestof! First time I’ve been best-of’d. For anyone interested in learning more about the art of typography, I cannot recommend Leslie Cabarga’s Logo, Font & Lettering Bible enough. It’s a huge, gorgeous, hardcover coffee-table book very reasonably priced at $18, and not particularly technical at all. Click Look Inside and you’ll see what I mean. It was my intro to typography and it’s a great jumping-off point. (No, that’s not even an affiliate link!)