John Mayer on… Licensing Fonts

In an interview with Kerwin Frost, while answering a question about what he learned from collaborating with Steve Jobs, John Mayer takes a stance on why it’s important to license fonts: “Buy the font, because free fonts are bullshit. You can always tell when someone uses it and I don’t care how good your record is, don’t come at me with a free font. I can tell from the album cover. I can tell who downloaded it from dafont.com and went ‘why pay 500 bucks for Atlas Grotesque when I can get this thing called Grote for free?’ Yeah, but guess what? The ‘h’ is up like four pixels in the word ‘the’ and the ‘e’ is off and a whole page of that? Your brain doesn’t know it but your heart can tell. Your heart goes ‘it’s not working’ and when you buy the font and you see a whole page of a 5