> The lack of competence from companies that acquire Japanese companies, and then fail to even price things in yen or offer support packages that cater to Japanese customers is really something.
In general I don't think it's just that. Pretty much all font foundries have... insufferable business models.
I once emailed one Japanese foundry asking to license one of their font to use on my website. I wanted a perpetual, one-time license to use on a single website, and I wanted to store and serve their font from my server. I was even prepared to pay low four figures for it.
Nope. I was told I need to pay a subscription fee, and I need to use their crappy Javascript to serve it. Okay, if you don't want my money then I'm not going to insist.
There will always be a place for calligraphy, artisan, who place creativity, handcraft and art first.
You can see it like pizzas:
there will always be someone who actually makes these pizzas from scratch; grows his own tomatoes in his garden, does his own flour, does his own cheese, raises pigs, etc.
But these are exceptions, maybe 0.001% - it gets very very expensive, these people do it for passion and art, not for money or scale.
You need to pre-order your pizza weeks before, you will pay a lot and you are not sure what will be the final taste (hopefully tasty), and you buy a story and supports someone.
On the other end, you have companies like Gustavo Gusto who produce 100'000 pizzas a day.
Quality ingredients, great execution, convenient, immediate, available and cheaper than hiring someone.
The irony is that the expensive and slow small artisan may actually make a worse product, than something which has been battle-tested on millions of people and whose supply chain has been controlled end-to-end.
After all of that, the industrial fonts like Roboto are not that bad, and if the industrial people offer you to customize it in a couple of prompts, then this is the cherry on top.
It's not about the shilling. It's about death of quality. As society we are self-destructing our culture using trash AI copies. It doesn't matter if it's fonts, code, movies or illustrations. Look at that service - the fonts are shit to meh but they are free. Corpo managers will of course want to squeeze every drop so they will push for free - especially as the AI gets close. So instead of allowing someone obsessive to produce highest quality output they can… we stop this by using stolen copy. In this can only lead to wiping any concepts of quality in our society while also robbing the people producing the quality work.
I for one, love it. I want every single mega corporation using crappy AI to the point where we can identify and not buy their products. Leave the little guys alone, they don't print money yet; so have not much choice.
Please don't be irrational. We all can make fun at clueless suits desperately throwing money at the AI buzzword furnace while still recognizing there are practical applications for it.
You know, I'd have to say that responding to a comment that says "Japanese font foundries are about to be replaced with generative AI" with a plug for your generative-AI fonts is about as on topic as you can be. I challenge you to describe a reason why that's a bad response.
In general I don't think it's just that. Pretty much all font foundries have... insufferable business models.
I once emailed one Japanese foundry asking to license one of their font to use on my website. I wanted a perpetual, one-time license to use on a single website, and I wanted to store and serve their font from my server. I was even prepared to pay low four figures for it.
Nope. I was told I need to pay a subscription fee, and I need to use their crappy Javascript to serve it. Okay, if you don't want my money then I'm not going to insist.