New MyFonts site
The new myfonts site is looking a little bit similar to the new open font library site! It seems the MyFonts beta site first went live in September, since the feedback page has some comments dated september 19th and thanks to the comments below, and some invitation emails went out in late October.
I wonder if this is a good thing or a bad thing; some people think the designs are similar, and others don’t.
The New MyFonts site by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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December 10, 2008 |
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11 Responses to “New MyFonts site”
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I see very little similarity beyond a use of pale blue for links.
The new site has been showing itself since at least July. Paul and Gerry probably saw it at TypeCon when they went over. I think that the copying suggestion is a bit of a stretch.
Hello, I’m the one mostly responsible for the design of the new MyFonts. I can assure you it wasn’t based on the Open Font Library site. In fact, surprisingly, I hadn’t seen that site until now (it is a great site though… despite the fact that I work for a font reseller, I’m a fan of all fonts, open source or not)!
We’ve been working off some form of the current design for quite a while now, probably somewhere around a year.
Over the past half year or so we’ve slowly been opening the site up to limited groups of “alpha” users and usability testers, and just took the password off it the other day, effectively making it “live”.
I hope that resolves any suspicions you might have had about our originality :)
Thanks!
I had a glimpse at the beta site of Myfonts in September. They’ve been working on it for a while too. I’d just say great minds think alike ;-)
Thanks for the quick response everyone! I’ve edited the post to not be contentious.
I don’t know, Dave. I think that you are the only person who thinks that the sites look similar.
Also, the new MyFonts site has great funtionality, whereas the OFL site, well, doesn’t. You can serach for fonts by style, add keywords, preview text strings, look at features, character sets, glyphs, etc. in a visual manner… I just don’t see any similarity at all. MyFonts.com is an enornous, well-navigable website. The OFL site might evolve into a useful project or resource, but right now the only thing they have in common is that they are both on the Internet.
Besides, even if the MyFonts website’s design was inspired by the OFL’s (which it clearly looks like it isn’t…) would that be bad? I thought the the OFL site was all about sharing resources! That means that the site’s design is just as sharable, right?
@Dan: If only I think its similar, that would be great; I personally have no problem at all with MyFonts copying the design (not that they did!) but I am concerned about our shared audience of graphic designers thinking “pah, the free software community can do nothing original, and this is the ‘Abibas’ of font publishers.”
The new OFLB site lacks features, sure - its in active development, and I wasn’t going to publicise it until January. Thanks for the feature suggestions though :-) You can preview text stings though, click the ‘book’ icons at the top of pages - our interactive complex script on screen keyboard is a world first, I think :-)
Well, this a hurdle that the community will have to overcoem anyway, no matter what their website looks like.
Hi, just to join in the fun - I designed the new Open Font Library site and I just wanted to say that I think the new MyFonts site is looking incredible! I’m loving all the functionality that seems to be jam-packed in everywhere.
Hopefully we’ll be able to be a worthy challenger once we’ve got all the planned bits and pieces in place. Considering the budget I’m pretty proud of what we’ve already achieved.
Amongst other little joys, OFLB kisses fixed-width layout goodbye. A challenge for any design-oriented site ;-)