Nick Shinn is a talented British emigre who has lived in Toronto, Canada since 1976. His typefaces are a fixture of the typographic scene, and include custom designs for the Toronto Globe & Mail and Maclean’s magazine, two of Canada’s best-known publications.

WebINK is this week adding fifty of Nick’s fonts, comprising seven families: Beaufort, Duffy Script, Figgins Sans, Paradigm, Pratt, Scotch Modern and Softmachine. Figgins Sans and Scotch Modern also come in “LCG” variants, standing for “Latin, Greek and Cyrillic,” which is a whole heck of a lot of language support.

One of the things that has long impressed me about Nick’s work is that it spans such a wide range from relatively traditional sans and serif text faces (most of the aforementioned) to trendy modern display work such as Softmachine. Plus, his stuff gets used for the coolest T-shirt slogans. So we’re all happy to have these additional great typefaces on board with WebINK!

Nick and I haven’t always agreed on everything. He hates the fact that companies like Adobe, Apple, Corel and Microsoft bundle so many good fonts with operating systems and applications, because he thinks it depresses the retail font licensing market. An argument can be made here that this bundling has the accused pernicious effect in two ways: first, supplying most non-professional users with enough fonts that they never need to buy any, and second, decreasing the perceived value of fonts by virtue of them being “free” with operating systems and applications. Having been responsible for such bundling at Adobe, I was once a representative of an “evil empire” from Nick’s POV.

I agree that these are real consequences of font bundling with applications. I just don’t see it as immoral, and I believe the negative effects on the type industry are counterbalanced by the benefits to the end users who end up with a bunch of good fonts. Of course, you can still debate whether this increases the variety of fonts in use (without the bundled fonts, people wouldn’t use as many) or decreases it (without the bundled fonts, people would license a wider variety of fonts).

The same issue has played out a bit differently in the Web space. There are a smaller number of the traditional “web safe fonts” (fonts not only bundled, but across operating systems) and no particularly good alternative until recently. So we’ve ended up with bland, homogeneous web design, at least from a typeface-choice perspective. That’s why I’m so glad to be part of the WebINK movement to change all that!

Oh, and me and Nick? Well, even if we disagreed about the morality of font bundling, we both love fonts and typography and want good things to happen. We kind of buried the hatchet five years ago today, when the two of us and Adam Twardoch collaborated on a half-day font dev workshop at TypeCon 2005 in New York, in which we taught attendees how to do cool things building contextual alternates into an OpenType script font, a la Bickham Script or Zapfino. And now we’re teaming up again on something else we can both agree on: a bigger variety of fonts one can use on web sites is a great thing for web designers and typography.

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