It’s that time once again, and as the man said, “The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast. The slow one now, will later be fast.” Since we wrote last year’s Top 10 Fonts post, we’ve increased our font options from 6500 to over 12,000. That’s a big Twinkie! Not to mention, with fonts designed by 127 foundries from 27 countries, the Top 10 Fonts list comes from what is a truly global playing field. It’s like the Font Olympics over here.
Read more…
2012: Some folks think we’re in for a change on 12/21. Some folks are all about the 1-2. And for others, 2112 is the jam. In the end, it’s all about the numbers–and we have some big ones to share.
Between YWFT and Nanamee, we now offer over 50,000 stock designs for sale. We showcase 127 of the best type foundries in the world, from 27 different countries, and we hand-pick each typeface design–over 12,000 of them. That’s a big number for us, since we only carried about 300 fonts two years ago. Also, the number 10 is significant, as we are about to reach our 10th year of business this summer. There’s also 3–the factor our business has increased by since January, 2010. Finally, the number 1 is big for us–as in first. YWFT were first to market with the wide range of powerful type testing capabilities of our TypeBrowser™ suite, and first to offer a large collection of fonts available for mobile apps and ebooks via extended licensing right in the shopping cart.
Since I took over as sole Creative Director in 2010, I have experienced the best years of my career working to bring these numbers to fruition, and I couldn’t have done it without you–our customers. So I want to say thank you, by offering our biggest font sale ever. In fact, this might be ANYONE’S biggest font sale ever.
Starting on January 9, and running until February 1st, all YWFT-designed fonts are 50% off! We have never offered discounts of this magnitude on our YWFT designs–all 140 of them.
Again, thank you!
Michael Paul Young
Creative Director
Adam Bognar sent us this short he and Benjamin Taft put together of their latest travels, which has a nice use of YWFT Hannah in the titles. Great video guys, but next time you better invite us along as well!
Join us in welcoming our latest Type Foundry to YouWorkForThem, Outside The Line (OTL). Hailing from the USA, OTL has created numerous icon fonts that have gone on to win prestigious type awards from organizations like U&lc. For this month only, enjoy seven select OTL titles marked 25% OFF the regular price.
We now provide a complete listing of the YWFT Type Foundries. We leave no stone unturned when finding the absolute best type foundries in the world. But don’t take our word for it — let the numbers speak for themselves. YouWorkForThem currently (December 9, 2011) showcases the work of 128 foundries, from 27 different countries, each one hand-picked. If you’re looking for the best type in the world, look no further.
Along with this new page listing, we updated the Designers listing as well with new sorting features.
Last week we updated our site with dozens of new features like TypeBrowser™ and the new Mobile Font Licenses. Another one of these updates was a little hidden gem, AutoSuggest. Now when you begin typing a few characters into the search box (top right of our shop, not this blog) the form will begin to suggest what items you may be looking for. This could be products, particular foundries/designers or even product sub-sections.
For example, typing ‘St‘ will find the 10 most popular products, 6 foundries/designers and 3 product sections that all start with those letters. Another little secret, if you can remember the product SKU* number, simply type the 5 digit number into the search box and our system will find the product for you!
*SKU numbers are the 5 digit codes you will find on each particular product page in the URL, for example the SKU for YWFT Agostina is T0207. You can also find the SKU number on any images you might save from the slide shows, for example T0207_00.jpg is the cover image for the YWFT Agostina slide show.
Our Creative Director, Michael Paul Young, has been invited to visit China this weekend and take part in Beijing Design Week. MPY will be composing a digital artwork live (Double Vision) during the Tiger Translate Battle of the Bands event. An open platform for creatives anywhere in the world, Double Vision calls for photographers to submit portraits of Asian cities, before illustrators add layers of perception-shifting artwork.
September 24th, 2011 / 20.30 – 2AM
Beijing, China @ Star Live
YouWorkForThem Affiliates! Now, earning your 10% commission is even easier. When promoting from your domain, you don’t have to manually add customn links all over the place. Just add your domain to your ClickInc Profile and Trulink from ClickInc will automatically create your affiliate links for you. Just test the link to confirm, and you’re done. It couldn’t be easier! These Trulinks will also help maximize SEO, so customers can more easily find your links from Google.
To add your domain(s), simply go to the Marketing tab, then click on the Domains option. Once in this area, you can add as many domains as you wish, but please allow a short time for our team to approve the additions.
The YouWorkForThem Affiliate Program: Helping You Help Us Help You.
Hey there everyone! You will be happy to know we’ve just updated our site, and you’ll notice some changes that we hope will make your experience smoother and faster. Most importantly, we’ve removed any sort of expiration date on your purchases. You can now re-download anything you’ve purchased, forever. This even includes purchases made prior to this posting. We’ve also removed a lot of old code and considerably increased the speed of the products pages, as well as redesigned the cart and the checkout pages. Cheers!
By now, everyone is aware of OpenType and its two main benefits; cross-platform compatibility, and its ability to support widely expanded character sets and layout features. It’s the second one that we want to spotlight here, to show you the real power of the format. Additionally, it has come to our attention that some designers might not know why in some releases it is worth the extra cost. A perfect example of this is the difference between Underware’s Liza Pro and Liza Standard releases.
If you compare the two prices (single weights) you will see that Liza Std is $60, while Liza Pro is $90. The fonts may appear to be identical at a glance, but in reality they are completely different. The differences lie in the details and the way they function. The power of Liza Pro comes from the mad chops that the Dutch gangsters at Underware put into its execution, allowing different combinations to behave in remarkably different ways–almost as if the font understands what you want before you do. The numbers tell the tale: Liza Std only has 387 glyphs, while Liza Pro has more than three times that, at 1,105 glyphs. If you need a standard, simple script font, than Liza Std will do you just fine. But if you want a dynamic script that is full of life and potential, Liza Pro is more than worth the few extra ducats. Watch the video above, and the difference quickly becomes apparent. You will notice Liza Pro (top) will “intelligently” change and adjust to the best visual flow of your letter combinations, whereas Liza Std, while still beautiful, is preset in its ways.
All of the OpenType features shown in the video above can be executed in any major graphic application like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator.
We are very excited to announce the birth of the Nanamee community – a new, custom-built stock media community for designers and customers to do business. Nanamee comes with style already in place, as the sister company to YouWorkForThem, the world-renowned font, stock art and graphic design shop. This is the best and the brightest stuff in the world and it’s free, and presented in a simple system that is easy to use for designers and customers alike.
So what does all that mean for you? If you’re a contributor, it’s somewhere you can sell your work alongside a community of world-class peers, with the unique niche of curation by a world-class design brand. Follow and be followed within our community, and benefit from our custom system, designed for you to be able to move quickly from inspiration to marketplace. If you’re a customer, rest assured that we carry only the coolest stock media, and we offer extremely competitive pricing.
Oh, the times they have a-changed since we wrote last year’s Top 10 Fonts post! (Wow, has it really been a year already?) There’s an old Japanese Proverb that states, “beginning is easy — continuing is hard.” A year ago, YouWorkForThem had seen its eighth birthday, and some parts of the shop were getting dusty. And so we started anew, with new design leadership, a deeper focus on our mission, and a plan to finish out our first decade by growing substantially. Read more…
