You Can’t Always Get What You Font
December 9th, 2008
Ouch…sorry about that pun in the subject.
Another big lesson learned this morning: deal with your font licensing as early as possible. My artist has created me amazing user interface artwork for the whole game using a font I’ve just discovered I can’t afford. I had forgotten that games require font licenses that are different than what you usually pay for a font. I contacted the foundry (that’s what a company that designs fonts is called) and asked them about licensing the font. They wrote me back with some fairly large numbers.
The result of all this is that I can’t afford the font I wanted to use. I’ve got a few options now:
- use one of the iPhone’s built-in fonts
- find a font from a cheaper foundry
- find a free font that’s still free to license commercially
- work out some kind of royalties deal with the font foundry
I think it’s time to start looking at new fonts. Crap.
Owen