It’s safe to assume that most people have no idea that fonts, like music or movies, are protected by intellectual property laws, they usually come with a hefty price tag, and they are uncommonly vulnerable to unjust adaptation and outright theft.

It’s amateurish to pirate fonts.

Fontstand is a new Mac app and web service from type designers Andrej Krátky and Peter Biľak that allow you to try and rent fonts for use in applications. You can try for an hour at a time every fonts in their catalogue or rent them monthly. Sounds good right?

The best part of it is that you can have full licensing option for your rented fonts if you have had rented them for twelve times 30-day period. So you can have the fonts you rented as if you have purchased a full desktop license.

They priced the rental fonts¹ at 10% of their full price for a 30-day period. It’s a great model, you can use many typefaces without the overhead to pay its full price. The more you rent them the more likely it will be added to your Fontstand app for good.

Because you don’t have to rent it consecutively to have it for good, think of it like an instalment model. You pay 20% more for the typefaces you often use and after twelve times renting it you stop paying for it and use it indefinitely. Well, at least during the lifetime of Fontstand. Read more about it in their licensing help page.

Currently they offer typefaces from many of my favorite foundry, albeit not with their full portfolio. From the big names like Typotheque, Fontsmith, Commercial Type, and TypeTogether, to indie favorites like Letters from Sweden and House Industries. In total of 334 families from 21 foundries.

I love the idea and the execution of Fonstand, the app is beautiful. I’m hopeful that they can grow to be a sustainable business so I can keep renting great typefaces without costing me an arm and a leg.

1. 
   

   They have no webfonts offering, yet ↩

Ooh, yummy. Bree Serif by TypeTogether is basically a steal.

(via Niklas Gerber)

The FontShop Plugin Beta allows designers and other type enthusiasts to try out FontShop fonts directly inside Adobe® Photoshop® CS5 and CS5.5. You can preview any of the over 150,000 FontShop fonts for free, in the context of your own artwork. This is a great new way to find the perfect typographic fit for your project.

Installed it, and played around with it, it’s an awesome idea, made our lives easier as pixel-pusher. Also pretty decent execution for a beta software. Download it here.

My new side project! I’ll release it for free as soon as I complete the regular weight, and I hope I can extend it to a complete and professional type family set.