Most respected: I’m not crazy enough to start that flame-fest.

Best selling: If licensed fonts count, I think Monotype wins for all the sales of Arial, Times New Roman, and Verdana that are packaged with Windows/MS Office.

For direct sales? Probably Monotype, at least now that Monotype has purchased Linotype and has a Brobdingnagian portfolio to sell.

If you want to consider hottest and most respected *newcomer* among font sources, my pick is

http://www.joshuadarden.com/

I think Linotype and Helvetica Neue need to figure in there somewhere.

Most-respected and best-selling can’t both be the same foundry! :-)

For the former I nominate TEFF.

hhp

Dear Mondob,

“If you want to consider hottest and most respected *newcomer* among font sources, my pick is
http://www.joshuadarden.com/”

That’s a bit ironic don’t you think? Because I just saw a thread where you rubbished Adobe for not including various bits and bobs in their OTF fonts and this company doesn’t even appear to sell OTF font formats at all! But I’ll say it again, Conundrum Text is just luscious even though some of the ornaments are dodgy!

Most-respected and best-selling can’t both be the same foundry! :-)

Enchedé rules!

Damn true!

Why does Enschedé rule? I admire the work they do, but I doubt very much if enough of us have actually used their fonts to know for sure if they are worthy of that much adoration.

(Playing devil’s advocate.)

Too many Dirty Martines ;)
But I have to admit that ‘The stroke’ has ment a lot to me!

I for one didn’t say TEFF was the best. This is about popular (if you can call it that, in this tiny niche) perception, something that’s not susceptible to much rationalization. And inaccessibility might actually be part of it.

hhp

Most respected: Emigre

Why? Five reasons...

1. Lack of scandal - harassing Hrant doesn’t count
2. Dud to quality ratio very low
3. Emigre magazine - print always equals respect
4. Mystique - ie. not on stage at every design conference
5. Ceramics - smoking pots!

Best Selling: Microsoft - you get a free OS with every font bundle ;-)

“you get a free OS with every font bundle”

But Si, the O and S glyphs do come with every Latin font :-P

ChrisL

PS: But Si, your post was a thing of beauty!

S=A/L

I don’t know why Josh Darden has not gone into OpenType yet, but in his case it scarcely matters because oldstyle figures (among other bits and bobs) are loaded as default in all his families that I like. Adobe deserves to be rubbished for leaving OSFs out of so many OT serif families, especially when they were available in type 1.

While i am totally biased (being the founder of FontFonts), i hasten to mention that i’ve often heard that we treat our designers very well. They get a very decent percentage of the retail price, detailed reports about who sells their fonts, where there were sold and with what type of license and for which platform. And our fonts still get chosen by a board that has active typedesigners on it. So it is still very much a library by designers for designers. Having a board chosing new fonts (or commissioning them occasionally) does mean less taste control than a 2-person foundry like Emigre can excert, but results in greater variety of expression. Not all my taste, but judging by that alone would have prevented a lof of diverse talent from publishing FontFonts.

And don’t forget: a lot of good designers published their first fonts with us, like Tobias Frere-Jones, EvB and JvR, Nick Shinn, Ole Schäfer, Lucas de Groot, Rian Hughes and many others.

Erik wrote;
’They get a very decent percentage of the retail price,’

I’m interested to know what the percentage is Erik, or does it vary?

20%, always.