In reply to Veer "shifts sights":
The curation model might not look good on a corporate bottom line.
Joe was making a lot of specimens.
I have always thought that the original online retail font distribution model, as pioneered by Makambo, was the best (with “wizard” software that enabled suppliers to upload and manage their products with minimum effort from the distributor), and it’s why I started my foundry in the first place.
Now if distributors could just standardize on a common size for specimens/banners, then foundries could do all the work of producing specimens—without having to produce differently sized and proportioned banners for each distributor. It’s a marketing principle, known as “collateral”, used in the printosphere for generations, but one which font resellers have been largely blind too. With the exception of Ethan Dunham at Fontspring, which utilizes the MyFonts “poster” size.
Strangely, many resellers don’t avail themselves of their suppliers’ marketing materials, and produce their own banners etc. Sure, that gives them control and consistency in branding, but as the Veer situation may have shown, it’s not the most cost-effective. Anyway, is there a downturn in the font market? Not that I’ve noticed.
Speaking of Makambo, that site went under, dropped by the conglomerate that owned it during the dotcom crash of 1999. A similar situation with Veer, I would imagine, the parent company cost-cutting its least profitable divisions, or looking for ways to cut costs during an economic downturn.
But stopping new product launches doesn’t make much sense for fonts, as that is when a typeface’s sales are most lively.
However, fonts do have a longer life than most other software, so I would expect Veer to be able to continue, silent running, for a while.
