how valuable is your type?

If you’re one of the designers over at Parachute, chances are your type is worth a lot of money. Towards the end of last month, the fine folks at this Greek based type foundry had the honor of winning the award for Original Typeface at the 2008 European Design Awards for its creation of Centro Pro, a superfamily of fonts containing three full families, with a total of over 40 fonts between them.

The typeface is celebrated for its “invisibility,” which essentially translates to its great legibility, an achievement that is particularly important because this quality has been maintained across each of the three flavors it comes in. Creating one typeface that can operate in the realms of Serif, Sans Serif and Slab Serif while bearing a strong resemblance to one another yet maintaining distinctive features is no small task, especially when each has to be equally legible. It’s no wonder then, that they received this award.

What probably will raise some eyebrows is the price tag: $2900 US Dollars for the entire superfamily, or about $966 USD for each individual family.

Seems crazy, doesn’t it? Even I’m taken aback by the price of this thing. $3000 for a typeface is no small chunk of change, and it trumps just about everything I’ve seen. To put things into persepctive, The Adobe Font Folio, a large collection of over 2,300 fonts, runs at about $2,600, versus Centro Pro’s 40-something fonts.

Most individual typeface families will run about $200-$400, and those are even fairly full featured. So what makes Centro Pro so special? Well, to be honest, without having used it myself (I can think of a lot of things I’d sooner spend $3,000 on), I can’t really say for certain. However, if the images of the face are any indication, this is a very well designed, extremely versatile set of fonts whose applications are manifold. The precision and attention to detail have a lot to do with the cost of the family, and you can be sure that the credentials of the new award will be enough to push many firms to be dropping a wad on this baby.

You may be thinking to yourself that you don’t see anything particularly special about this font. Believe it or not, that is precisely where its value lies. A truly great typeface (for the most part) is one that does not call undue attention to itself, but instead allows the viewer/reader to focus on the words that have been laid out by the type. This kind of thing is a lot harder to achieve than you might expect, and it is for exactly this reason that these guys are asking as much as they are to purchase it.

On the flip side of things, there are many free resources for good typefaces (dafont.com is not one of them) that can help the everyday designer who might not have that kind of discretionary income to throw around. One great example is exljbris, which offers some great free typefaces for you to add some extra originality to your work. I would highly recommend Anivers, Calluna and Fontin/Fontin Sans.

Another great free typeface I came across recently is called Colaborate (deliberately spelled with one “l”). It does some very interesting things with a few of its characters and has the luxury of standing out from the norm while still maintaining a semblance of restrained elegance, and more importantly, usability.

So, what’s the bottom line? Truth is, there isn’t necessarily a single standard for judging a typeface’s monetary value, but as with so many other things in life, you usually get what you pay for when it comes to type. The exception to this is that the design community is unique in that many of its members seek to offer methods for helping one another out, and there is as much an emphasis on sharing as there is on exclusivity and originality, so occasionally, some great deals on excellent stuff will pop up. The real value of a typeface comes from how much mileage you get from it, and its level of effectiveness.