Quick and Dirty No. 2
Quick and Dirty is a (semi-)weekly dump of interesting links that recently caught my attention and may or may not be related to design and business.
1. Meta: Was sich Facebook vom „Metaverse“ verspricht und was realistisch ist (in German)
Metaverse, NFT, Web 3.0, yada yada yada. The article by Marcel Weiss is a good and measured article after all of last week’s hype and hate about Facebook’s renaming to Meta and its announcement to focus on building the metaverse. The key takeaway for me is that the renaming and the repositioning are ultimately more about signaling to the employees and third-party suppliers a commitment to a new kind of focus of the company. Basically, it’s the announcement of a huge change management process with a strong narrative.
The article does an excellent job setting the context for the metaverse and what the immediately overused word means for the future of our digital lives.
2. A famous type foundry’s sale to a PE-backed giant has rattled the font industry
Yes, Monotype is marching towards the monopolization of the font license market (It’s uncanny how much its name describes what they are doing). Monotype, the most prominent company for typeface licensing globally, recently acquired the famous and notorious type foundry Hoefler & Co. With the acquisition, Monotype adds at least two considerable assets to its possession: The typeface Gotham, famously used by Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and the domain typography.com.
The article talks in-depth about how type foundries compete against such a big player and how founders plan for their exit. Jonathan Hoefler has achieved a lot as a type designer (even if his behavior in recent years led to a lot of aversion towards him) that the sale of his company doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise. Nevertheless, it’s still sad to see that one of the most prominent independent type foundries was acquired by the industries’ MegaCorp.
Even though the article might paint a bleak future of the font market, I am convinced that the acquisition poses an excellent opportunity for independent type foundries to at least easily defend the niche of independent type design. The fact that Monotype is managed by a private equity firm, its poor reputation among type and graphic designers, and its licensing model based on recurring font licenses will eventually bite Monotype in its tail.