Charity and sponsorship (crowdfunding): two different forms of financing font development

Cyrillic lovers will surely be pleased with the news that the talented and prolific type designer, Ivan Smooth , better known as Giovanni Lemonad, has announced that two new free fonts with Russian letters will be released soon.

Firstly - Russo font :

(Although Lemonade only announced this font in his blog, in fact, he already has it in Google Web Fonts under the name Russo One .)

Secondly - the Stalin font , the result of the processing (and additions) of the Metro font:

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I am sure: both of them will be a pleasant addition to those free Cyrillic fonts that Lemonade draws himself and collects from other font designers. In just a few years, an extensive collection has been selected (just over three dozen fonts and families): “Prosto”, “Upheaval Pro”, “Captcha Code”, “Zhizn”, “Flow” (and “Flow Bold”), “Powerview”, “Hardpixel”, “Bicubik”, “Hattori Hanzo Light”, “Fontin Sans Cyr”, “Airport”, “Furore”, “Bender”, “Epool”, “Dited”, “Unimportant”, “Metro”, “Days” "," Otscookie "," Philosopher "," Molot "," London "," 20 db "," Neucha "," Cuprum "," Nobre first "," Nobro second "," Nobr third "," Puzzle ", “SuwiKisu” and “Ass”.

This news in itself deserves close attention, but for me it will also serve as a reason to talk with all of you about what the Smooths are looking for a sponsor.

On the front page of the Jovanny.Ru website, it is not difficult to read that Ivan the Smooth will need $ 55,000 in order to completely abandon any other work within two years and deal exclusively with the design of free fonts.

The sponsor will receive advertising in each downloaded free font, advertising on the project website, mentioning sponsorship in all related events and publications.

The site project Jovanny.Ru will be reworked with these funds, the previous project fonts will be redesigned and expanded. There will also be work on the creation of new fonts and typefaces, of which eighteen will be created personally by Lemonade, and another twelve will be created by young authors under his leadership and with financial support from the same fifty-five thousand budget.

How should this proposal be evaluated?

Firstly, it is not unprecedented: free fonts with sponsorship were created in Russia before. Emil Yakupov, commenting on the recent Paratayp free font “ PT Mono Bold ”, said that ParaType created the PT Mono family with the financial assistance of Google, and Rospechat participated in the financing of PT Sans and PT Serif .

Secondly, it is generous. Thirty new free fonts with Cyrillic support - this is also a dummy. This is comparable to the current number of fonts in the aforementioned Lemonade collection (that is, it will double). This is comparable with the current number of Cyrillic fonts in the Google Web Fonts collection (there are thirty-four of them), that is, it will almost double. The collection on the Open Font Library website (where fonts should not only be free, but also free) contained only fifteen fonts with Cyrillic in general when I was watching it .

Therefore, if you suddenly head any company that can spend $ 55,000 on a sharp increase in the number of free fonts with Russian letters, or if you are able to influence the financial plans of such a company, consider the proposal of Ivan Gladkikh.

No less interesting is the question of what will happen if the sponsor is not found.

As is well known, in addition to sponsorship (which can also be called patronage when it comes to funding the sciences and the arts - and yet drawing fonts like art and partially obeys strict mathematical rules), there is another type of funding, which in Russian is called “ fold "(Although many Anglomans prefer to call it another, a noticeably longer and more difficult to pronounce overseas word - " crowdfunding "). The essence of the story is that a fairly large group of people is going, each of whom is ready to contribute only a small fraction of the required amount, but collectively they are able to achieve the desired.

This is a curious question for me to investigate: is Habrahabr (here I mean not the hosts of Habrahabr, that is, “Thematic Media”, namely the entire Habrahabr as a blogger community) able to save enough money to finance Ivan Gladkikh and How actively to increase the number of free fonts?

If we consider the opportunity to lay out exactly 55,000 dollars in one sitting, then, most likely, no. Too large amount; Habrahabr community is not enough for her numerous. Currently, there are only 62,435 bloggers on the list who have the right to vote, and I don’t think that at least half of them will even just read my blog post.

Mentally, we divide this amount into twelve parts: abstracting for a while from the knowledge that Lemonade wants to get it all, and imagine that he will not find the sponsor and agree to act in two-month stages of work. Then it’s not about 55,000 dollars for two years for 18 fonts from Lemonade and 12 fonts by other authors, but about 4,583⅓ dollars every two months for 1½ fonts from Lemonade and 1 font by another author.

Is it a lot or a little?

Probably, looking to compare.

I propose to compare here with what the reference point: according to the Typekit price list , full access to all paid fonts of the extensive Typekit collection (at the “Portfolio” tariff) costs $ 50 per year, that is, ≈4 dollars per month.

If we assume that a user of fonts who pay $ 8 every two months is willing to sacrifice the same amount (and the same every two months) to the right thing to create two and a half free fonts with Cyrillic, then it turns out that it was enough 573 such people to fully finance the Lemonade project.

Personally, I feel that the appearance of free fonts for Russian is many times more important than using paid ones, so I would be willing to sacrifice 2,976 rubles (≈100 dollars) every two months. It turns out that 46 such people would be enough to fully finance the Lemonade project.

I suggest to all readers of my blog entry, who have the right to comment on blog entries on Habrahabr, to participate in the study of the issue of folding. To do this, fairly honestly indicate in the comments how many dollars you personally are willing to sacrifice once every two months to create 2½ free fonts with Cyrillic. In a few days, each of us can visit the comments, re-read them with a calculator and visually assess the total potential of the habrakhabrovskaya folding in relation to this good cause, and also count the potential participants in this folding.

Evaluation may be overstated if someone loses, overestimating their real financial capabilities. The assessment may be too low due to the fact that far from all readers of my blog, willing to donate funds to create free fonts, have the right to comment on blogs on Habrahabr: there are in fact also account holders in read only mode, and “external” readers, never having been registered on Habrahabr.

However, in any case, the assessment can be very interesting. It will become clear whether it is indeed possible to finance free fonts in a clubhouse, or whether sponsorship is the only alternative.

I can say in advance that in this case the number of participants in the pool will be no less important than the number of funds sacrificed by each of them. It is easy to count that a thousand people, donating only $ 5 every two months (which is only ≈75 rubles per month), can reach more than 40 people donating $ 100 every two months.