Set the default price to $15, $20 or $30 instead of the $1 that it's at now. You'll increase the perceived value of the font while making a ton more money. There's no point in having the initial price "anchored in" at the ridiculously low price of one dollar.
Personally I am not a fan of "pay-what-you-want" products. It sounds very utopian but it neglects the cost of a guilty conscience. I try to derive a fair price in my head but it's still a balancing act between feeling like I underpaid and I'm a jerk or I overpaid and I'm a chump.
Overall, pay-what-you-want feels more like marketing than a socialist ideal.
I suspect this is very similar to tipping - many people say that it's illogical, or that they hate it, or it makes them feel awkward... but personally I love tipping, it's something I am actively happy about when in America (not so much tipping here in the UK).
Personally, if the service is terrible I'll leave no tip, if it's standard, as expected, I'll leave a generic tip (something like 10-20% in restaurants, depending on the total price), if it's great I'll leave a generous tip.
I often feel good being able to thank someone by tipping well, and the only times I have ever felt bad about it were when I wanted to tip more but didn't have the change on me and there was no way to add the tip to a card payment.
So I guess it's just different people prefer different situations socially.
That's a good point that can support both your position - and the gp.
I'm totally with you regarding tipping. Coming from DE this is something you're doing voluntarily, for good service and as much as you like. It's a 'well done' or 'thank you'.
Now I'm in IL and here it is - for all intents and purposes - mandatory. The bill says 'SERVICE NOT INCLUDED' (yes, often in caps. Some waiters like to make sure that foreigners 'get it' by saying it again once or twice or using a marker to make it even more prominent on the bill). You are expected to give a tip of 10%. Service is shitty, food was crap? If you don't give the tip, people might come after you and discuss it.
Since I loathe that custom I could understand if the gp has a similar mindset, feeling _forced_ to pay up.
I downloaded the font and donated. I like Subtle Patterns and what Atle Mo [1] is doing and wanted to support it. Chances are fairly good that I won't use the font for anything serious, but sometimes paying for something isn't about the product you get.
Just an FYI, the whole site looks naff in Windows because of the use of "Lucida Grande" and no font-stack degradation. Even a "sans-serif" fallback would have sufficed.
It's unhelpful that the demonstration contains precisely zero lowercase letters, and don't show what it looks like in a small size. Those are two big considerations when buying a font.
Thanks, it's obvious that those characters are available. It wasn't talking about that. They aren't demonstrated. For someone telling me to "read the site", you didn't actually read my comment that carefully.
How do I install this for use on my website? I've never included fonts before, outside of the Google Web Fonts API which just asks I stick a link tag in the template.
Love the "R" in regular weight! I have no idea what the style is called, but drawing the right hand side of the letter so that it avoids intersection with the left-hand vertical stroke is my favorite way to do it. :)
If anyone from subtle patterns is reading it would be really nice if you could increase the contrast of the body text to the background. Mid grey on white is hard to read.
Judging by typeface design, samples, and description, the font isn't designed for body copy. Also, right now on the page font samples themselves play the role of “huge, super thin headline”—having more than one of these usually is not a good idea from visual design standpoint, so I wouldn't use it for headline as well with current layout.
That said, it would make perfect sense to have headline set in Subtle Sans, but with larger font size and font samples moved to a less prominent place.
By the way, the Download button actually uses Subtle Sans (not the best place for it IMO though).
Typeface is important, but not as much as knowing how to use it properly. In this regard, typographic solution from Twitter Bootstrap brought a very nice change to the world of ‘developer-built’ websites appearance.
Very cool. This is only tangentially related, but I was surprised (and delighted) to see that Ideal Sans is available for free from Google web fonts. It is one of the truly top-tier fonts on Google web fonts; so if you're considering a sans... (I really don't have a dog in this fight; just passing along a deal)
According to Jason Kottke HFJ has their own webfonts service in private beta. He's using their Whitney font with this new service in his redesigned site:
Whoops, my (really) bad! I don't know why I remembered this incorrectly. Google web fonts has Open Sans--not bad by Google web fonts standards, but no ideal sans. http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Open+Sans
I don't care for the fonts myself, but it's really cool to see more industries try out the pay-what-you-want model. It's starting to become large in gaming especially, and I really hope it does well. Lately everything seems to be going towards "micropayments", and that really scares me.
It seems unlikely that products with limited audiences, high associated value, and high price points are going to end up "pay-what-you-want" models. I'm sure lots of people will end up releasing typefaces this way, but it'll mostly be as a means to audition for foundries.
For me it's because they're so often used in an exploitative way. I'll use gaming again as my example. Look at Farmville, or what seems like the majority of mobile games lately. It's so common to see "Pay $2 for mojo points" or whatever their pretend currency may be, and used to sell virtual items. Now that in itself isn't evil, but these items are often things to make the game less "grindy", and so developers are encouraged to add grind in the first place to maximize profit. The developer isn't focusing on making the best possible experience for the player anymore.
That's true mostly with Farmville (buy a tractor to double your harvest speed), but other games take this on as well too. Another example: Companies want to sell over-priced map packs and such, and so will stop the modding communities from creating their own content. If there aren't user submitted maps the company can sell their own for far more.
I used games as an example because it's the easiest for me to come up with examples, but I think this extends into other mediums as well. To me, micropayments change the focus of the publisher of that medium to look for profit where they didn't before, and that creates a worse product.
This is a very loose idea I've had in my head for a while and I haven't put it all together like this before, I'm certainly not an expert on business models or anything like that. This post is purely conjecture on my part.
Well, I feel you on the not-liking-abusive-games thing. But I don't think that's a mark against micropayments per se. I mean, that would be like saying that most criminals deal in cash, so cash is evil (which, by the way, is an argument I've actually heard before.)
Don't throw the baby (micropayments) out with the bathwater (abusive games).
I too wouldn't mind to see how this model works for the author of the font, but that's not what a linked page is about. The font itself is of a little notability. It is not an example of a fine type design to put it mildly, nor is is notable due to its designer. Yes, it's hosted on subtlepatterns, but that's about all that makes it different from a truck load of similar free fonts available from dafont and fontsquirrel.
