> The use of a bespoke, BBC-owned typeface also aims to save the organisation money, because it will no longer need to pay the licence fee to use external typefaces, according to the BBC.
It's fascinating to me that 100-year-old fonts can still be so expensive that it's cost-effective for an organization to commission their own (not to mention the costs of replacing everything) from scratch like this.
I imagine that the BBC are thinking long term here and the payoff may take 10+ years to recoup but it makes sense if you think your organisation is going to be around for at least another 50 years.
- 5,000 desktop licenses (BBC has 20k+ employees) - $200k (one-time). Note that desktop licenses often have limitations on use in logos, e.g., so this might not cover BBC's usage.
- 1.5B pageviews for the webfont - $1.7M (monthly). BBC gets 1.5B pageviews per month.
- App (50k), ePub (1k), and Server (4) licensing - $200k.
So full retail, Gill Sans would cost BBC $20M+ per year. I guarantee BBC isn't paying full retail, but you can get a sense from the size and scale of the spend why this might be a cost-effective solution.
> It's fascinating to me that 100-year-old fonts can still be so expensive
I wonder if it would've been cheaper for them to commission a clean-room digital version of Gil Sans? From what I gather the font itself (published 1928) is out of copyright in the UK, so the main licensing issue is probably just the more-recent digital representations.
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It's fascinating to me that 100-year-old fonts can still be so expensive that it's cost-effective for an organization to commission their own (not to mention the costs of replacing everything) from scratch like this.
- 5,000 desktop licenses (BBC has 20k+ employees) - $200k (one-time). Note that desktop licenses often have limitations on use in logos, e.g., so this might not cover BBC's usage.
- 1.5B pageviews for the webfont - $1.7M (monthly). BBC gets 1.5B pageviews per month.
- App (50k), ePub (1k), and Server (4) licensing - $200k.
So full retail, Gill Sans would cost BBC $20M+ per year. I guarantee BBC isn't paying full retail, but you can get a sense from the size and scale of the spend why this might be a cost-effective solution.
I wonder if it would've been cheaper for them to commission a clean-room digital version of Gil Sans? From what I gather the font itself (published 1928) is out of copyright in the UK, so the main licensing issue is probably just the more-recent digital representations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gill_Sans
http://www.museumscopyright.org.uk/private.pdf
font-family: ReithSans,Arial,Helvetica,freesans,sans-serif;
And IMHO it looks lovely. :)