SkyFonts, the Rent-a-Font service

Ownership or access? Increasingly, that seems to be one of the fundamental questions of digital culture and commerce. Would you rather spend $10 to get an album on iTunes, or a month of Spotify Premium? Is Adobe’s Creative Cloud the greatest thing since sliced bread or does the idea of subscribing to software that goes away when you stop paying for it make you a little queasy?

Someday soon you may find yourself renting not just your music and software, but your fonts as well. At least that’s the idea behind SkyFonts, a cloud-based font rental service that allows users to rent real OpenType fonts from foundries like Linotype, Monotype, ITC, Bitstream, and more.

Why would anyone want to pay for temporary access to a font? First, for the same reason you’d subscribe to Creative Cloud or Spotify: the upfront cost of access to a large pool of content is much lower than ownership. Second, with access to thousands of fonts you otherwise couldn’t afford, you can expand your design options and creativity.

With SkyFonts, you can try any font for free (for 5 minutes), and if you decide to use it, you can pay for it only as long as you need it, from a month to a day. When the subscription period expires, the font is automatically removed from your computer. SkyFonts work with desktop applications, on up to 5 machines which are automatically synced via the SkyFonts portal. You cannot manage SkyFonts with other font management software, and you can’t use them as Web fonts.

SkyFonts works by installing a system extension that operates in the background to activate and deactivate fonts on your computer. The extension is available for Mac and Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7), and the SkyFonts portal from which you download and manage fonts works in Firefox, IE, Chrome, and Safari.

The key question of cost is unanswered at this point, as the website only mentions that “pricing information will be released over the coming months.”

SkyFonts is currently in beta release. If you’re interested in participating, you can apply for access to the program.

Editor in Chief of CreativePro. Instructor at LinkedIn Learning with courses on InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, GIMP, Inkscape, and Affinity Publisher.
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