Free for Personal Use Only: a rant
Listen here, buddies.
I understand that typeface designers need to eat. I get it.
But what’s up with this ‘free for personal use only’ business? It’s killing my vibe. It’s unbuzzing my buzz.
I’m not averse to paying for stuff I like. My laptop is so full of licensed software, illustrations, photos and fonts that, if it puts two and two together, we’ll have baby Skynet sitting right there.
And yet, the whole ‘free for personal use’ thing bothers me. This may make me sound entitled and it’s perhaps the epitome of ingratitude but what exactly do you mean when you say ‘for personal use’?
If I make some birthday invitations for my kid’s party and send them out to my friends, does this count as personal use?
If I make t-shirts for my futsal team (a purely hypothetical scenario, as I hate fustal with all my heart and some of my penis) and give them away, does that sound like personal use?
I’d much rather just buy your fonts. Seriously. When I go to browse Behance to dig up some lovely fonts for the readers of this blog, I always get a pang of excitement when I see a banner that says ‘Free font’, especially if the preview graphic looks nice. When I click on the item and find out that it’s only free for personal use, it feels like I’ve been cheated. It feels disingenuous. It feels like manipulation.
And, even if I love your font, you know what I’m not going to do? I won’t copy/paste your email address, open a browser, load my email client and send you an email asking if I could use your font in my project. I’ll just say ‘fuck it’ and move on to a different typeface.
To summarize, do not try to get me to click on your post under false pretenses. If the font is free for personal use only, write it in a small point size on the banner itself. Even better? Let me download a free weight with no usage restrictions or remove some punctuation characters from the demo set.
Thank you.
