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When it comes to decisions brand leaders have to make, choosing the typeface that will live across your website and on all of your products is a pretty big one. Customers are going to see and interact with your copy throughout the life of your brand — and making a change to your design style will cause a ripple effect with lasting impacts.
Monotype is the largest company that is dedicated to typefaces. According to Jonathan Zsittnik, the Vice President of Commerce Channels at Monotype, the company has the world’s largest library of typefaces, and thousands of type families, many of which are the backbone of key brands.
On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Jonathan explains the intricacies that go into running and selling that massive inventory of fonts. Plus, he dives into the importance of choosing and properly licensing a font style and how it can impact a brand.
Main Takeaways:
- Would You Like To Update? — A brand is a living, breathing thing, and needs to change with the times. But updating a brand’s typeface may require more careful thought and planning than some may anticipate. How do you pick or create a typeface that works for both mobile and desktop, speaks to your brand’s identity, works in multiple languages, and meets different users needs? Tune in to find out!
- It All Adds Up — The Ecommerce experience does not begin and end with a customer putting an item in a cart and then completing a transaction. That experience needs to carry on after the purchase has occurred, because in order to turn a one-time purchase into a repeat customer, brands need to stay top of mind for their customers. Every part of your brand — including the typeface you choose — makes up the Ecommerce experience and should be taken into consideration.
For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.
Key Quotes:
“A lot of our successful typeface releases come from either new opportunities based on the way that type needs to be used or updates to existing typefaces to make sure that they’re catching up with the digital needs of today.”
“When you’re thinking about a new typeface, you want to think about the challenges that designers are having today and make sure that you’re designing it for those needs.”
“A lot of the big name typeface families like Helvetica and you mentioned Futura are used by these major brands because they know them, they’re familiar with them. They know they perform well. They’re versatile typefaces, and they’re just beautiful designs. And so these updates that are happening, it’s a trend that you’re seeing more and more of, and what the audience is getting is a broader range of typeface suites which can be exciting so you can extend the family to include more decorative designs so that you can extend the family designs to be more creative with your work. You’re getting broader character ranges, which is excellent for taking your brand to different places and geographies. And also some visual adjustments to make sure the performance is there, regardless of what the typeface is.”
“The fun thing that we do is making sure that we give our customers a sense of how the typeface is going to perform before they purchase. You need a lot of tools that allow the designer to experiment with the typeface before they purchase it — before they lay their money down, make sure they understand what it’s going to look like. So the visuals that we supply are critically important. It’s about making sure that we have images that don’t just show the range of the typeface, but also some fun examples of what it might look like when it’s designed to really just show off the characteristics of the type.”
“Typefaces are a lot like music where there will never be enough created to satisfy the creative needs, both on part of the person that’s doing the creation and the designers that are consuming what’s created.”
“When you’re thinking about your Ecommerce experience, it’s not really just about those few precious minutes that the customer spends on the website. To do it right, you really have to be thinking about how that Ecommerce site supports the brand and what are the key elements of a brand that you want to inject into that Ecommerce experience. And then that Ecommerce experience really broadens beyond just shopping. It’s all the things that you’re going to do to retain that customer and get them to think about you and create that positive sentiment when they’re not shopping so when the need arrives, they’re right there going back to your site to purchase something new.”
Mentions:
Bio:
Jonathan Zsittnik is the Vice President, Commerce Channels at Monotype. He is a seasoned business executive with experiencing leading marketing, support, customer success and e-commerce operations.
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Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce
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Transcript:
Stephanie:
Welcome back to Up Next In Commerce. I’m your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of mission.org. Today on the show, we have Jonathan Zitnik the Vice President of commerce channels at Monotype. How’s it going, Jonathan?
Jonathan:
Very good. Thanks so much for having me, Stephanie.
Stephanie:
Yeah, thanks for coming on. We were just mentioning that today’s a special day. It’s your 19th anniversary. And how lucky are we to have you on the show?
Jonathan:
Oh, man. It’s crazy to have been here so long, but I’ve enjoyed the ride. And what better way to kind of celebrate that anniversary by talking about Monotype and all the things that I’ve done and see coming, than being here with you today. So thanks for having me.
Stephanie:
Yeah, it’s going to be really fun. I think you’re the first person we’ve had on the show that’s been somewhere this long. So I think it’ll be a really good conversation where you’ve actually been able to see a company evolve, and grow, and change. So I’m excited to dive into it.
Jonathan:
Awesome.
Stephanie:
I was hoping we can first start at Monotype. So I was reading a bit about it. But then I saw that you employ, I think it was somewhere around like 700 people and had really high revenue numbers. And I was wondering, what do you guys actually do? What is Monotype? And how do I think about the company?
Jonathan:
Sure. So I think probably your audience is largely not familiar with Monotype, but would recognize many of our flagship products. So if you’ve ever worked with the fonts Helvetica, Arial or Times New Roman, then you’ve worked with some of our key offerings. Monotype is the largest company that’s dedicated to type. And we have the world’s largest library of typefaces, where you’ll find thousands of type families, many of which are the backbone of key brands. So the list of typefaces goes on quite a bit that that brands rely on every day.
Stephanie:
That’s awesome. So are you guys purely a typeface design company or do you do other things as well?
Jonathan:
So type is really at the core of what we do, but we do have some other supporting businesses that all relate to helping brands express themselves and make sure that their digital expression is on point and translates across their various mediums that they communicate over.
Stephanie:
Very cool. So when I’m thinking about fonts, I guess maybe I’m a newbie when it’s coming, or when I’m thinking about fonts, but oftentimes, I’ll maybe go and look for free fonts or trying to see like what’s out there. So how does Monotype make money and monetize these fonts?
Jonathan:
Sure. So the majority of our revenue comes from creative professionals that are working with type and those creative professionals could be internal, so working on behalf of the brands, at the brands, at those enterprises, or working at agencies, or even individual creative professionals that are in freeline design spaces. So we’re really supporting the creative space and these are the people that know about type, care about type and know how to leverage it within their design projects. And understand that it can really be the backbone of a brand. So these are the people that are willing to spend the value in a typeface.
Stephanie:
Awesome. And I saw I think you guys developed some fonts I know like Times New Roman, huh, that’s a favorite. Is that you guys who created that one?
Jonathan:
It is, that was a custom typeface at the turn of the century for the London Times. And so it’s gone through many, many iterations over the years to catch up with digital times to make the progression that the type has gone from over the years from metal type through phototype and now it’s a digital type.
Stephanie:
That’s cool. So how do we think about types transforming over time? Like, what are the levers that make you guys want to change a font, or typeface, or edit it, or make a new one? Like, how are you staying on top of these trends and actually deciding like, “Ah, this would be a new way to maybe shift the fonts or create something new or even transition an old font into something more relevant.”
Jonathan:
Yeah, that’s a great question. A lot of our successful typeface releases come from either new opportunities based on the way that type needs to be used or updates to existing typefaces to make sure that they’re catching up with the digital needs of today, right? So take Helvetica as an example. Last year we released Helvetica Now, and it was an update for Helvetica, which cleaned up some of the idiosyncrasies that had caught up with the typeface over the years and make sure that it has all the necessary characters that are used today, some adjustments so that the type looks great on screens versus some of the way the characters were drawn originally, and which didn’t translate as well.
Jonathan:
So those types of updates are really common. And as I said, previously, when you’re thinking about a new typeface, you want to think about the challenges that designers are having today and make sure that you’re designing it for those needs.
Stephanie:
So what are some of those challenges, if a brand is thinking right now about I mean, what first comes to mind is maybe creating a logo or something like that? And I think for us, we’re pretty, like easy standard. I think we just use like Futura or something like that. But for people who are looking to actually develop their own typeface, what are some challenges they might encounter down the road when it comes to maybe designers trying to use that?
Jonathan:
Yeah. So if you want to think about all the places where the brand needs to be represented, right? So if you are going to be using your type in an application, like a mobile application, you’re going to make sure that the type performs its small sizes, that it looks great on screen and that the readability remains strong when it’s presented that way. And you also want to think about your audience, right?
Jonathan:
So if you’re selecting a typeface, and you know that you’re going to be communicating with an audience that’s global, you have to make sure that you have the necessary characters to ensure that you can communicate in all the languages your audience uses. So those are just a couple of the considerations, but those are big ones.
Stephanie:
No, that’s some good things to keep in mind. So when I’m like… what are some of the maybe top typefaces right now that you see a lot of brands going with? Like, is there anything new that’s happening or shifts happening in the world of fonts that maybe hasn’t happened up until now?
Jonathan:
So I mentioned the remaking of typefaces and updating them and that’s a big trend. A lot of the big name typeface families like Helvetica and you mentioned Futura are used by these major brands because they know them, they’re familiar with them. They know they perform well. They’re versatile typefaces, and they’re just beautiful designs. And so these updates that are happening, it’s a trend that you’re seeing more and more of, and what the audience is getting is a broader range of typeface suites which can be exciting so you can extend the family to include more decorative designs so that you can extend the family designs to be more creative with your work.
Jonathan:
You’re getting broader character ranges, which is excellent for taking your brand to different places and geographies. And also some visual adjustments to make sure the performance is there, regardless of what the typeface is. So that’s a big one.
Stephanie:
All right, cool. So I wanted to get into your role a bit. Being at the company for 19 years. I want to hear how it’s evolved and what your day to day looks like right now.
Jonathan:
Sure. So when I started back in the day, it was still really at the dawn of Ecommerce. It was kind of an exciting place to begin, certainly for Ecommerce marketing. Pay per click advertising was just emerging. So I don’t think even Google had introduced AdSense at that point. So it was kind of an exciting time and we used all of those things really to establish our Ecommerce business, which when I started, had really just launched.
Jonathan:
And so at that point, we developed myfonts.com and through my time we’ve gone through numerous acquisitions. So we have a host of commerce properties, myfonts.com the largest of those today. And so it really went from an Ecommerce marketing roll up into managing operations for an Ecommerce business and took a brief turn in that to focus on a subscription offering and then helped build out a customer success and support organization to help the greater Monotype business grow and ensure that our customers including our enterprise, customers, really have the support that they needed.
Jonathan:
And more recently kind of turned my focus back over to the Ecommerce world. So now the role is managing the global digital commerce business, which includes our font sites, some of which I just mentioned, a little bit of our indirect business and a relatively new business that’s fun and growing, which is called flip font. And it’s an application that runs on a mobile phone unless you’ve changed the UI typeface to one that you purchase from a store.
Stephanie:
Oh, very cool.
Jonathan:
Yeah.
Stephanie:
So what does that look like overseeing the different Ecommerce channels? Like are there different maybe learnings that you’re getting from having different websites to be able to like see trends on or see like which ones are doing things successfully, and which ones maybe need to have a little help. What kind of things are you seeing by having that oversight of multiple websites?
Jonathan:
Yeah, well, that’s certainly one of the challenges right? Because it’s a lot of businesses rolled up into one business. But there’s advantages of that too, right? Because you can test out different techniques on one website. And then if it works out, you can roll it out to others. And one of the challenges is that they all have slightly different audiences, the customers coming from different places, like if you look at the different customer segments, they’re not identical. They have different preferences and so you have to act and think in the interest of these different audience segments.
Stephanie:
Got it. So where are these customers coming from right now? Like, what kind of acquisition channels are you guys using to find new customers and then how are you treating them differently depending on the source of where they came?
Jonathan:
Yeah. So most of our customers, one of the advantages that we have is that a lot of our typefaces have been in use for many years. And so when a typeface gets, it’s purchased and sees used within a project, and that project will spurn additional use, right? Especially if it’s in the hands of an agency and an agency might use it with multiple clients.
Jonathan:
So a lot of people will come to the channels already knowing exactly what they need. And so a lot of the focus is on making sure that we can get that customer who already knows that they need to use this particular font, get them the font, get them in the cart, make sure that they know what license they need, so they can get back to designing as quickly as possible. So that’s a lot of the emphasis there.
Jonathan:
And then the other point of emphasis is really on the discovery phase, and this is for the designer that knows that they need a particular type of typeface, they might have a classification in mind or a couple of different qualities in mind that will suit the needs of their project. So what are the tools that we can provide them, how can we help them filter down the inventory of a hundred thousand plus fonts so they can get down to the one that’s really going to be the perfect design, perfect choice for their design.
Stephanie:
How do you go about personalizing that because I could see it being quite a bit of consulting and education depending on maybe the industry and I could see people also coming in with quite a few wild ideas where when I was looking at design recently it’s like, “Okay, don’t go too crazy. Don’t go too designery or too out there because that stuff will probably got out of style soon.” And like, how would someone go about recommending what kind of font a brand should use?
Jonathan:
Yeah, so I think there’s a couple things you can focus on. One is just the making sure that you provide enough tools to help someone navigate the inventory. And so if you understand the attributes of your inventory, you can make it easy to filter down. And also you can go take a look at just the Sans Serif fonts. And then you can look at the Humanistic Sans, not to geek out too much on type here. No, but you can kind of narrow down your selections by the various characteristics of the typefaces for the person that has an idea of what they’re looking for.
Jonathan:
But I think the more fun thing that we do is making sure that we give our customers a sense of how the typeface is going to perform before they purchase, right? So you need a lot of tools that allows the designer to experiment with the typeface before they purchase it. So before they lay their money down, make sure they understand what it’s going to look like. And the visuals that we supply are critically important. So making sure that we have the images that don’t just show the range of the typeface that’s important, but also some fun examples of what it might look like when it’s designed. So really just show off the characteristics of the type.
Stephanie:
Yeah, that’s really important. I was just thinking when we’re going through making website changes and stuff, I always wish they could just be an easy, quick switch of like, what does it look like with this font, this font, and maybe you guys have this functionality, and I just never knew it. But oftentimes, it’s me like trying to preview and going back and changing again, previewing again. And after maybe changing it a couple times, I’m like, “Oh, I’m kind of done.” So do you guys have that functionality? I think you mentioned it with the app earlier. But do you have that for desktop as well?
Jonathan:
Yeah, there’s different ways that you can do that. And depending on what tool or what subscription you might have, there’s different ways that you can experiment with typefaces. And that’s always been a huge problem for the type industry, right? It is sort of, how do you allow someone to experiment with your product, but make sure that you’re not cannibalizing your sale? So that’s kind of the trade off that we have to work through.
Stephanie:
So I’m interested in thinking about metrics when it comes to changing typefaces. I mean, I’m sure you guys have case studies where different fonts produce different results, can you speak through some of that?
Jonathan:
Well, it’s difficult to predict. So unless you’re working with a typeface that has a track record, and you’re doing a new version, you’re actually not certain what you’re going to get, right? So typefaces are a lot like music where there will never be enough created to satisfy the creative needs, both on part of the person that’s doing the creation and the designers that are consuming what’s created. So a lot of it is strategic, right?
Jonathan:
So we know that there are certain needs that need to be served so we’ll do a release there. And some of it is creative expression.
Stephanie:
Got it. And you mentioned that a lot of people come to you knowing what they already want. Do you also do paid acquisition for getting customers to find out about you. Like if it was someone like me and I’m looking for a brand redesign, how would you go about targeting someone who maybe I don’t really know much about fonts or for me if I wanted the font I might open up maybe Adobe Photoshop and get it in there and like I wouldn’t actually know the process of maybe even buying one and licensing and stuff like that.
Stephanie:
So how would you go about maybe pulling in a new customer like me with very low awareness?
Jonathan:
Yeah, sure. So for targeting individual creative professionals, paid search of course is huge and all the typical advertising methods and affiliate programs, which bring people in and will, on the paid search side will also invest in terms where that are not product specific unless there’s someone that’s looking for a particular style of typeface we can bid on those terms or using terms like something that’s more broad like font or by fonts as well. And for the larger customers that we work with those might come in to the agencies that we partner with as well.
Jonathan:
So if we doing a, involved in a big brand design, it’s not uncommon for us to partner with the agency that’s working with the brand. So some business comes in through that way. And in other cases, we might see that a brand has started to work with one of our typefaces, and we’ll get to know them a little bit better and see if we can expand the relationship and then help them with the next steps in their brands. And maybe there’s different ways that we can help them as they prepare to make that move further down the digital path.
Stephanie:
Got it. So you mentioned partnerships earlier, and I wanted to maybe touch on that a bit because I think maybe in our prep notes you’d mentioned partnering with other technology providers to basically have a more creative and collaborative approach when it comes to design and the whole ecosystem in general. I was hoping you could talk about what those partnerships look like and how you guys are thinking about the design and not just typeface, but the industry as a whole.
Jonathan:
Yeah, so I think on a more practical level, there are lots of Ecommerce providers that we partner with to put great quality type in the hands of their end users, right? So if it’s an Ecommerce platform that has their own templates, you might find Monotype typefaces built in there. So when you’re doing your design, you don’t have to choose from the standard website, web safe typefaces that you know, are going to be resident on just about everybody’s machine, right? So you have a nice variety of selections to choose from. So that’s one way that we partner with which puts our type in the hands of more end users.
Jonathan:
But I think that like when you’re thinking more broadly about collaborations with Ecommerce, the industry has just evolved so much. And today Ecommerce when you’re thinking about your Ecommerce experience, it’s not really just about those few precious minutes that the customer spends on the website, right? To do it right, you really have to be thinking about how that Ecommerce site supports the brand and what are the key elements of a brand that you want to inject into that Ecommerce experience. And then that Ecommerce experience really broadens beyond just shopping.
Jonathan:
It’s all the things that you’re going to do to retain that customer and get them to think about you and create that positive sentiment when they’re not shopping. So when the need arrives, they’re right there going back to your site to purchase something new.
Stephanie:
Yeah, that makes sense. So talking about retaining customers, a bit and what came to mind was actually licensing for some reason, because that’s also an arena that I don’t fully understand. And it sometimes scares me of like, “Oh, is there certain licenses we should have around this? And like, how do you protect yourself and your company?” So I was hoping you could touch on what are some of the failures a new Ecommerce company might be making right now, when it comes to typefaces and licensing and not having the right licenses. What do you see happening right now that could be prevented that a lot of people might not know about?
Jonathan:
Yeah, font licensing is complex, and it’s always been complex. And I think that’s something that the industry Monotype included, needs to work on to simplify that and make it easier on our customers. And so a traditional font license, the traditional found license that we’ve been selling forever is a desktop license. So that allows someone to use a particular font on their machine, possibly multiple machines depending on the license. They do vary. And that’s one of the bits of complexity right there is that… so take my fonts, for example, we have thousands of partner foundries that sell their products on our site. Many of which have their own licenses.
Jonathan:
So that puts a lot on the customer to look through and actually read the license and understand what they’re getting. So one of our strategies there is to consolidate on fair industry standard terms there. So that the user is going to be more familiar with the license that they’re purchasing. But even looking beyond that, it gets more complicated when you look at different use cases for the type, right? So if you want to use a font on the web, that’s going to require slightly different font file as well as a different EULA, excuse me a license agreement and you have to pay attention to the amount of distribution with the font as well. So, are there limitations on the page views associated with the font?
Jonathan:
And, so really additional use cases oftentimes are tied to additional license types. So if you want to use a font in a mobile application, or you want to use it in digital ad, you might require a different license to go along with that. So there’s a lot of different formats there that they have to pay attention to. And it’s our job as a marketplace to make sure that we educate our customers when they come to the site and help them find the right license. Especially people that are looking to be compliant with that. [crosstalk 00:24:46].
Stephanie:
Yeah, licensing is definitely tricky. I mean, how do you… like if I’m using photoshop, for example, and they have all the fonts in there, and maybe I’m using that to build my own logo, or build a page or something or some kind of like PDF, or if you’re using a website builder tool that already has a bunch of fonts like is very different type of licensing thing you should think through, or are you kind of already covered because maybe Adobe already has like an unlimited forever license?
Jonathan:
Sure. Speaking in generalities here, right, because there are different font license agreements. But typically, a font license for a desktop font license is going to cover use on your machine. And as long as that font file isn’t traveling to another user, you’re good, right? So the output of that font as long as it’s static text that is no longer leveraging the font file can be distributed. And that’s the case with most, not all, but most font licenses.
Stephanie:
So I want to kind of touch on some higher level Ecommerce trends because you’ve been in the industry for a while. I think you could have some fun answers for them. First one is what kind of trends or patterns are you excited about right now in the world of Ecommerce?
Jonathan:
I think the thing I’m most excited about right now is machine learning. And it’s application for recommendations. So recommendations within Ecommerce has been a problem that we’ve tried to solve collectively for 10s of years now. And I feel like it’s really turned the corner in the past few years. The recommendations you get on store and your music service or other places where it’s being leveraged have really gotten good, it’s impressive, and it’s exciting. So you can go from a place where you’re making recommendations that maybe weren’t well informed, and just come across as noise to recommendations that are personalized and accurate and are really helping your customers solve a problem. So it’s interpreted really well and I think there’s a lot of potential there.
Stephanie:
Yep. I completely agree. What about COVID? Have you guys experienced any kind of impact from COVID right now? And how do you see the industry moving forward after this?
Jonathan:
Yeah. So I think everybody’s feeling some sort of impact. I think the companies that have really seen the most positive effects of it are the companies that have the brick and mortar locations where their Ecommerce businesses is taking off, because that’s where the activity is moving. And we have digital goods and digital delivery.
Jonathan:
So we didn’t see that. We saw some initial impact and as our customers spend is really tied to marketing and the agency world which was hit pretty hard. But we’ve since seen a lot of recovery, which is great. We’re seeing a lot of positive signs. And when you look at the various products that we sell, we’re seeing some really encouraging and some growth signs, particularly on the use of type on the web which makes sense that kind of speaks to the broader industry of Ecommerce. So that’s been a strong point.
Stephanie:
Yeah, that’s really interesting. Are there any other surprises that you’ve seen through all this where you’re like, “Oh, now there’s all of a sudden an industry around this, or people popping up asking for this that we didn’t have before.”
Jonathan:
The ripple effects of this are huge, right? And so, I think initially, it was kind of hard to put two and two together and see what the impact would be. But you think about it, it makes sense when you see companies like Zoom or DocuSign having success that they are and all of this and so we’ve kind of seen the effects of that as well and are just trying to cope with it like a lot of companies.
Jonathan:
And I think in some regard, it’s been easier than then we anticipated. I’m very thankful that we’re here today and not in 2010, right? If you can imagine trying to do the things that you go through on a daily basis, without the collaboration and communication tools that we have today, it would be incredibly challenging.
Stephanie:
Yep. Are there any challenges that you guys are facing? Of course, it wouldn’t be 2010 levels challenges, but is there anything right now where it’s kind of like, feeling a little tough to do X, Y, or Z based on the changes in the market or the increased demand?
Jonathan:
I don’t think that they’re market driven. I think if you look at the things that we need to do, everything is totally accomplishable. But that doesn’t mean it’s not without challenges, right? So you have a team and you work together. There’s just something. It’s difficult to put your finger on, but I don’t know if it’s the morale of the group or just that whatever you get from being able to socialize in person, so you feel the effects of that when you can’t meet in person and just have that initial catch up. But you know, you can kind of do that informally but it’s definitely missing something.
Jonathan:
And so I think everybody kind of has to find different ways to make sure they get that in their life, in their day to day. The other thing that I think is more challenging is when you’re trying to solve a difficult problem, and you can’t collaborate the same way. So like I said, Zoom is great, but there’s really no substitute for getting five people in a room together with a whiteboard and just working through a problem with everybody’s undivided attention. So I do long for those days. And hope that we can do those types of things again soon.
Stephanie:
Yep, I long for the happy hour day where you can just get together again and not worry and catch up on all things work or not work if you don’t feel like talking about it.
Jonathan:
Absolutely.
Stephanie:
So I want to hear a little bit about more about Monotype and the successes behind your guys brand. What do you see is working? Like how do you portray your company in a design oriented, beautiful way.
Jonathan:
One of the things that we’ve had success with is putting emphasis and attention into our communication materials. And if you look at the newsletters, they’re very heavy with imagery that shows the type, shows it off, shows how it can be used. And it’s really gratifying when our customers tell us that they find these materials which are ultimately marketing materials that are designed to sell, and inform, and educate that they’re inspirational to them. Now, so it checks a lot of boxes there and I definitely perceive that as a victory.
Stephanie:
How do you go about building those materials? Like how do you know what’s going to connect with the customer? How do you know… what one person might think is beautiful another one might be like, “Urgh.” So how do you build something that connects with the majority of your customers or prospects?
Jonathan:
Sure, well, you certainly aren’t going to please everyone. You need to rely on talented people that are great with type and see the unique value in an individual typeface and know how to use it and design that shows off its characteristics and present it in a way that shows how it might likely be used by a typical project that would work well for.
Stephanie:
Got it. Do you ever have to educate new customers in a way of like, “Well, here’s what we did with this font, like look at that little curlicue there, that’s newer,” like showing people why something special?
Jonathan:
Yeah, so I think, readability, legibility might be a good example. And you could read all day on the various aspects of a typeface that can aid or hinder readability. And so we’ll put a lot of time into the generalities of what makes a typeface more legible, more readable. And then certainly, if there’s an individual typeface that has some of those characters or those properties we would point those out.
Stephanie:
Yeah, there’s a email newsletter, I can’t remember who it is, but they essentially show just how subtle design tweaks and fonts make a big difference in like portraying whatever you’re talking about. And it was displayed in such a way that made it be like, “Oh, of course, this one looks better,” or, “Oh, we’re talking about food in this one.” Like you can kind of get a feeling depending on the type of font and I just thought that was a really nice way to just show two things up against each other and it’d be general accepted like which one looks better, which one connects with the brand depending on what the product was.
Jonathan:
Yeah, that’s a great way to present it because great typographic often goes unnoticed.
Stephanie:
Yep. I think that was kind of their point is like, you wouldn’t think anything if you just saw this by itself. But if you saw a random font next to it, or a font that was just like so off brand, it would be very obvious and you would not feel disconnected with it. So I like that.
Jonathan:
Right.
Stephanie:
All right, let’s jump into the lightning round brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I’m going to throw a question your way and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Jonathan?
Jonathan:
I am ready.
Stephanie:
All right, what’s up next on your Netflix queue?
Jonathan:
Cobra Kai, high recommendation from my wife. So she’s jumped in and I’m trailing her. But that’s gotten her through the pandemic.
Stephanie:
I like it. I saw that being the trailer playing and I was just about to watch it. So I’m glad that it has good recommendations from your wife. What’s up next on your reading list?
Jonathan:
It’s a book I think it’s called Writing Down The Bones. And it’s a practical guide to doing more writing and getting more practice at it and ultimately improving your writing skills.
Stephanie:
All right, cool, I like that. I thought it was going to be A Practical Guide To Typography. And I would say, “Man, Jonathan, you are a lover of typography.”
Jonathan:
I’m all in.
Stephanie:
I like it. Where are you traveling to when you’re able to go out and about again?
Jonathan:
Oh, Cocoa Beach, Florida is my happy place. And I’m looking forward to getting back down there again.
Stephanie:
I love Florida. And the last one, if you were to have a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be?
Jonathan:
Oh, wow. Let’s see. Well, I guess I can’t steal your idea and talk about Ecommerce.
Stephanie:
You can just keep coming on the show.
Jonathan:
I might have the chops to talk about fonts with an Ecommerce audience, but I don’t think I could handle it there. So let’s see, I might do something just on creativity in general, because I love the arts. I love expression. And so it’d be fascinating to pull in different people from different genres and have them speak about their art form. And who would my first guests be?
Stephanie:
Yeah.
Jonathan:
Let’s see, I’ll probably pull in a musician. And let’s see. I’m really excited about the new Deep Sea Diver album that’s coming out next month. So Jessica Bazzi.
Stephanie:
Cool. That sounds great. All right, Jonathan, well, thank you for coming on the show and teaching our audience about all things fonts. Where can people find out more about you and Monotype?
Jonathan:
So you can follow me on twitter @Zitnik and for Monotype, it’s just monotype.com. And you can learn more than you ever wanted to know about fonts from there or you can go to our flagship Ecommerce store myfonts.com.
Stephanie:
Awesome. Thanks so much.
