This makes it impossible for us to send out free fonts and still be able to pay designers a fair royalty. As a fellow designer, we hope that you can appreciate the necessity to compensate designers for their creative efforts. At Emigre we are already making an effort to service the design community and, in particular students, by offering a free educational magazine about design, as well as other educational materials on type design such as our type posters. It is the sales of our fonts that help make this financially possible. Also, customers who purchase Emigre Fonts today, receive a substantial discount, as Emigre has never raised its prices throughout our 11 years of licensing fonts, during which time inflation has eroded a significant percentage of our income and the designers' royalties as well.
Typeface designers spend months, even years, developing each design.
If designers are not compensated for their efforts, they will not be able to invest in creating new designs for people like you to enjoy in the future. Before the age of personal computers, barely more than a decade ago, type designers relied on typesetting equipment manufacturers to fund the development of their designs. Typesetters purchased fonts from the equipment manufacturers and the end users of type, graphic designers and publishers, in turn, compensated the typesetter by paying for the setting of their text. The personal computer democratized the manufacture, distribution and usage of fonts. For the first time in history, it is the users who must purchase fonts because they have been empowered with the ability to set their own type.