Money matters and all things type!
Pricing ethics for bigger clients, Black type designers, and font language detection tools
IN THE MARGINS
All things equal except budget, what would you charge?
I’m in a motion graphics community called Full Harbor (by Austin Saylor) and when we aren’t nerding out about nulls and plug-ins, we’re talking about freelance life like money. A great discussion happened about rates that slid into ethics and business practices. Let’s say you have 2 potential clients: a big name with lots of money and a smaller biz not as lucrative. Considering all things equal for both projects, EXCEPT budget, what do you charge? Do you charge the bigger company more for the exact same work? Do you throw in more bells and whistles for one client over the other? How is “value” defined and is it relative? What about "impact"?
I’ve seen part of this discussion in graphic design interwoven with pricing of products such as fonts. For example, when you buy a web font, it’s usually based on how many views the website gets. The more views, the more expensive the font - thus implying the bigger the client’s audience, the more valuable the font is to them and therefore you should charge more.
Many people in creative industries say “your rate is your rate and that isn’t dictated by a client’s budget”. Others make room for nuance and may implement pricing strategies such as sliding scales. Where is the line between being thoughtful and being a business? You gotta pay your bills but you also wanna be a human, right?
I’ve always offered packages with varying rates based on scope or deliverables. Client has less money, they get less stuff or less of my time. I've made pro-bono exceptions or heavily discounted but it’s always on my terms, with me approaching the client first, AND they get an invoice with the original cost as a line item. In the future, I may experiment with sliding scale pricing or I might just charge cis het white clients more because #reparations and #TeamRestorativeJustice. What’s important is talking about this and not being so secretive about money.
ACCESSIBILITY
Tool To Detect Language Support In Fonts
All creatives are guilty of designing in a bubble. Often what you know or are inspired by comes from your local environment or limited lived experiences. Part of accessibility is giving the broadest reach of people the ability to use or interact with your design or product. This includes language accessibility. HYPERGLOT is a database and tool for detecting language support in fonts. You can find out which languages and how many speakers a font supports. The more, the merrier! It was interesting to see which are the rarely supported languages.... Hm....
“Hyperglot’s database open-source to allow it to grow and enable others to use it. If you spot an issue or notice your favourite language is altogether missing from the database, get in touch. We will happily incorporate your feedback and credit you. Hopefully, it will help font developers support more languages and perhaps even feed back into mainstream sources used by software developers around the world.” (Source: @rosettatype tweet)
DIVERSITY & INCLUSION
Black In Type
Big industry names like Nina Stossinger often put out quasi calls for underrepresented designers by asking questions like “where are the Black type designers?” I usually bookmark the thread of responses and collect them myself but here is a dope resource of Black type designers and foundry owners that Typographica put work into. Scroll down for info on African writing systems and a list of BIPOC scholarships for type design & lettering education that is updated as applications open.
See list of Black type designers + foundry owners
ART & DESIGN
TDC Releases All Their Salon Videos
Type Directors Club has made all their virtual salon videos available to all! I’m probably gonna skip the ones featuring overused people like Paula Scher and instead check out other gems like information graphics and “A Perspective on Arabic Type, Identity, & Culture”.
Signing off from the Starship SBLTN,
Laneen (Pronouns: she/they)
🎧 Listening - Demons (Philosophical Sessions) by Jacob Lee
👀 Watching - Falcon and Winter Soldier mini-series
✔️ Random Fact - I attended this TDC talk with Tony DiSpigna, Spencerian script master
🖊️ Word of the Day - "ethics" vs "morals" - the difference