The furore over @font-face in CSS has seen a lot of negativity thrown back and forth. People turning on Microsoft for pushing DRM-like properties into font formats; turning on foundries for not offering licenses to their fonts for use on the web; and turning on the open source community for seriously suggesting we use free fonts that look like ass. Everyone’s a critic, as always.

A few weeks ago either Notcot or Design You Trust (or both, as is often the case) linked to Flaminia (pictured), a free font that doesn’t look like ass. In fact, it’s quite nice in its own right, and comes in a full suite of serifs, slab, rounded and so forth. It’s presented over at The League of Movable Type, which is a wonderful little site promoting high-quality free fonts.

Not that I’m a well qualified critic of type, but I don’t regard Flaminia as a great typeface, I think it has some flaws and annoyances that will affect its longevity and application, but it still has quality, and is eye catching and I’m certainly thinking of trying it out for a few projects.

I forgot to post it then, but today also got linked to 10 great free fonts for font face embedding at Ralf Herrmann’s typography weblog. It shows that, from the initial gnashing of teeth around the @font-face issue, people are starting to get positive about it. That’s nice, and I think seeing emphasis put on good, licensed typefaces probably puts more valuable pressure on the larger foundries than ranting ever did.

As usual, change takes time and demonstrable benefit. It’s frustrating, but if it takes two years to gain the momentum for $100 web licenses to become standard options when you purchase a typeface, so what? Whilst entertaining, I don’t share the attitude of fuck the foundries, I would rather focus on embracing what’s available. Which is the same thing in practice. Do so, and the foundries will follow eventually.

Oh, that ‘$100 web license’ is my guess at a business model for this. Professional typefaces cost hundreds for a complete suite of weights. Archer, for example is $400. I reckon a $100-per-site license charge on top would work. It’s easily swallowed up in the cost of building website, but still enough to be very profitable for the foundry.

Considering the day-rate of a web developer, $100 to deploy a typeface of choice won’t cause alarm in terms of client costs, and you could argue foundries could charge a lot more. But $100 also keeps it within range of soloists, personal sites and the web at large. You could also offer a $50 basic license for just the regular face, bold and italic alone.