Choosing the correct font in your identity is an important communication decision. The consumer responds to both the look and feel of the font and to its accessibility. Investing in a font is good business sense.

The Cost Per User

Today, many fonts cost in the region of £30 (€45/$60) for a Basic Licence for five users; £6 per user. If a 1,000 user licence is required, the cost fallse to around £2.40 per user. This is very little considering that a font licence is perpetual, and the font contains all of the characters necessary to communicate with around two billion people in their native language. It's the price of a pint of beer, but has vastly more use and pleasure.

Saving money, just one example

The fonts designed for BT's printed telephone directories made a direct impact on cost savings. By carefully considering aspects of brand, print production and legibility we managed to design fonts that saved around ten lines per page. Multiplied over the number of pages in The Phone Book and the number of directories printed each year, the cost of the font development was offset by a single print run. Not only did it save paper but also ink and most importantly, press time. And besides the cost, the font promotes sustainable design by making a positive impact on the environment.

Licensing versus Commissioning

The decision whether to license (and modify) a font or to commission an original design depends on various factors. The look and feel of the typography obviously plays a large part as the font will have to sit harmoniously with all the other design elements. Technical requirements are important too, to ensure the font works on the client's systems, as are any restrictions on distribution to the client and suppliers. Lastly, the number of users of the font is probably the deciding factor in this process.

Clearly, it does not make financial sense to design an original font for a small client with no more than a hundred users. It is our experience, however, that with large companies of about 9,000 users (internal and suppliers) or more it is financially beneficial to commission an original font from Dalton Maag.