Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label Small Business

The Long Tail

Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream. I recently stumbled across a business/statistics term I hadn’t heard of before; the long tail. It was just recently coined by Chris Anderson in 2004. On the supply curve, it is the products that are out of range of the sweet spot or the most popular products. In the future to survive, businesses will have to offer more choices to their customers and become specialized, essentially flattening the demand curve. The internet has allowed the chance for more specialized products to be distributed at affordable prices. In a bookstore you only have so much space for your product; Amazon has unlimited space. In the type design world, smaller foundries are essential to this process, offering more and more choices and specialization. Don’t let anyone tell you we have enough fonts. Wired article Wikipedia article

The Protection of Creativity

Recently, I had a unique opportunity; to start my own business, selling my products on the internet. There is no other time on earth people have had the opportunity to create new products as the internet age. Companies can be formed without much of startup costs and risks involved with starting a new company and distributing products in the old era. Unfortunately, stealing their products is also much easier. Recently, I found a website that specifically asks to steal my typefaces. Another typeface designer found entire CDs of his work being sold on Ebay. This designer created some sort of installer program, and caught a lot of flak for protecting his creations from fellow designers. Here is my response, supporting his efforts: It amazes me that designers, people who sell their intellectual property to make a living, would jump all over a company that wants to protect its business by protecting its product. Maybe Letterhead’s method isn’t foolproof (from the designer standpoint, it soun...