How Do Students Use Fonts in School?
We’re excited to release our brand new Dinamo Student Font Pack 2, which bundles together another 11 complete typeface families for €55. 🎒 Our first Student Font pack cost €123, but we’ve reduced our price by more than 50% after sitting down and speaking with 70 students across the globe, and hearing what they had to say about buying and using fonts in design school today. We learned so much from them all 💞 and so we’re sharing our main takeaways with you.
Do students buy fonts?
A large majority of our respondents (68%), said that typefaces are too expensive—and they would LOVE to buy more if they were more accessible.
Out of all the students we surveyed, half purchase a couple of new typefaces a year. 17% only use freely available typefaces, and 26% never buy new typefaces at all—though they still use them.
Most of the students make a small amount of money from design work, though only 11% said they’re earning a lot from these side gigs. Unsurprisingly, 88% of those making a good profit purchase fonts regularly. 2/3 of the students who don’t work design side jobs—and are focusing on their studies or have non-design related work—use fonts that are freely available to them.
Despite the fact that students don’t buy many typefaces, 87% of respondents agreed that using “fresh fonts” is very important to them.
4/5 of these students are working towards a BA or equivalent
Where do students get fonts?
Over 3/4 of the students (secretly) trade font files with one another—and 1/4 confirmed that there’s a lot of “shady dealings and font trading” amongst their peers (we once engaged heavily in this market ourselves). One said: “You wouldn’t believe how many typefaces I’ve archived in ‘unofficial ways.’” Congratulations, we guess. 😁
It also turns out that 76% of students prefer to buy from independent type foundries vs. mega retailers like Google (though these findings might be a bit skewed, as we surveyed our own followers, and they’re a bit ahead of the mainstream 😉).
And we’ve always felt more institutions should provide students with free font files—so we were interested to learn that 59% of respondents have not been given fonts by their schools. 19% have been given a selection, but they don’t like the fonts available to them.
→ If you’re an educator and would like to offer Dinamo fonts in class, please reach out to us!
Updates to our student Font Offering
How can fonts be more accessible to students? 70% of the students we spoke with said they have not purchased the first Dinamo Font Pack—because they felt it isn’t affordable enough.
For us, this was very revealing: It seems like we needed to work a little harder to find a $weet $pot that works for everyone. And that’s what we did:
- We’ve reduced the price down to €55 (previously €123)
- Student font packs now include Desktop + Web + Variable fonts
- Reminder: You can use the fonts in self-initiated commercial work