Date
Words
Harry BennettLuke Prowse on captivating collaborations, bespoke typefaces, and NaN’s Fair Font Pricing system
Back with Luke Prowse, the founder of renowned type design practice NaN, we’re talking about the next revolution in the world of typography: Fair Font Pricing. By considering the economic disparities between countries, NaN’s innovative approach makes high-quality fonts more accessible to designers worldwide. In our conversation, Prowse discusses his captivating collaborations with renowned studios, the simplicity of NaN’s licensing structure, and his vision for a more inclusive and equitable future for the type design industry.
HB Hey Luke! How’s it going?
LP Great thanks Harry! I know you’re well :o]
HB You were mentioned on TBI by longtime collaborators Ragged Edge, discussing your work on their rebrand for Wise. How do you find working with Ragged Edge, and how did you find working on that project?
LP We love Ragged Edge. We’ve been collaborating for many years now and they never cease to surprise or challenge us with their thinking – just a great bunch of people.
On Wise, it was a case of helping out on the technical side and supporting their vision of how the font customisation played out.
HB Do you have a favourite bespoke brand typeface that you’ve developed in partnership with another studio, and what was the concept behind it?
LP This is a bit like picking a favourite child – they’re all special in their own way! Our recent Cohere collaboration with Luke and Jody and WalkieTalkie fonts with Koto were especially satisfying because we were able to push hard on the variable font side. Both were technically challenging but conceptually the VF mechanics aligned with the wider brand stories. This is something we’re looking at more and more.
Fonts are generally costed with a northern hemisphere bias.
HB Recently, you’ve changed how you licence fonts at NaN, describing the shift as ‘Fair Font Pricing,’ which varies from country to country, with perks including 80% off for students and 50% off for charities and social enterprises. What inspired this change?
LP In a word, accessibility. Despite being available to purchase worldwide, fonts are generally costed with a northern hemisphere bias, a Euro-US axis that can more easily afford them. Our simple proposal is that they should be priced relative to local economies. We recently published fonts in the Thai, Arabic and Pan-African Latin scripts for example and it feels inappropriate not to make them more accessible to those who actually need them. Designers everywhere have to rationalise costs to themselves, to their clients and this is our way of making NaN fonts available to as many as possible, as fairly as possible. The same goes for the student and charity licences; there’s a large percentage reduction to support on top of the local Fair Font Pricing.
HB How do you determine the prices per country?
LP We got the idea from Gumtree as it happens. They implemented something called Pay Price Parity that determines a country’s purchasing power by interfacing with Worldbank data. We’re doing the same with our own additional secret sauce mixed in. It’s an imperfect one-size-fits-all solution but it gets us closer to where we want to be.
HB Within NaN’s licensing structure, what is the difference between basic and extended use?
LP We wanted to simplify things for the licensee and avoid costs stacking up as every new use case is added – which happens quickly and in some cases is as mad as it is maddening. Basic covers the fundamentals (web, print, socials) whereas Extended is targeted more at brand use where everything is covered and you don’t need to worry about infringing some obscure use-case.
We want licensees to get as much use out of the font as possible.
HB Would you hope to see more of these licensing changes across the rest of the type design industry?
LP Absolutely. We were working on this for a long time and hopefully, it’ll inspire further critique and change.
HB What other changes do you think need to be made outside a shift in its price model?
LP Anecdotally speaking from conversations and my own occasional licensing: flexibility and simplicity. We want licensees to get as much use out of the font as possible without nagging worries of license infringement – and they can be costly. We don’t want to police that and nobody needs that shadow in the back of their mind.
HB Turning back to you to close off, what’ve you got in the pipeline? What does the future hold for NaN?
LP We have some cracking custom font collaborations ongoing and we’re developing a lovely retail serif at the moment. After launching Metrify and it being the end of the year, we're also going to make sure we take some time to chill and reflect I can’t speak highly enough of the NaN team, everyone brings their own special positivity – long may that continue.
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