A garden is not an object, but a process:
Font Garden is an open-source neo-modernist post-authorship font publishing platform and index of the OFL ecosystem with a focus on the Latin and Arabic scripts. Our aim is to index, curate, fund, and improve the OFL commons and provide clean ethical training datasets for LLMs.
Font Garden is a fork of the Google Fonts system and tries to maintain compatability with that system where possible, but unlike the Google Fonts system, the website itself is open-source and anyone is welcome and encouraged to make pull request on the Git repo
The rest of this about section is a collection of short essays explaing ideas from design, software engineering, and economics that have influenced the philosophy of Font Garden.
NFTs and free information:
The problem of monetizing digital fonts is reproducible information is effectively infinite in supply, leaving them impossible to price, free like air.
Previous attempts at digital monetization try to create an artificial scarcity through paywalls and DRM, technically ineffective against any piracy but backed by socialized pressure and threats of legal action. These models of course unethically restrict the free flow of information.
NFT’s are an alternative form of creating artificial digital scarcity, so it’s easy to make the intuitive leap that they also negatively limit free information. However, by changing the value proposition of digital goods from a scarcity based on limiting information access to one based on provable provenance, they have no need to rely on gatekeeping access to NFT content to secure value. This is a great boon for the freedom of information movement.
Blockchain is a naturalistic technology, it would have been developed in a thousand timelines, just as the CPU would have, just as double book accounting or abstracted money would have—or AI will—but copyright law was a confusing and awkward historical aberration and works against memetics form of culture and art-making that have been practiced for most of human cultural history. Remixing is the natural mode of art making online.
Digital scarcity instituted by legal infrastructure was an awkward, artificial and ethically problematic intervention on the free flow of information; NFTs managing scarcity as a trustless bookkeeping allows accessibility to be achieved without undermining production incentives.
NFT’s solve the problem of trustless digital deeds of ownership, making the need to conflate ownership with content accessibility in copyable digital media outmoded—and with it, convoluted and invasive DRM solutions, unclear licensing rights and likely one day, paywalling altogether.
Unpacking Post-Authorship
Information wants to be free, culture follows evolutionary flows—viral memetics—and accreditation, provenance, patents, copyright are all burdens that strangle the free flow of the work and ruin its memetic fitness. Recognize memetic culture cedes no authorship, no credit; art is produced in a lucid state playing handmaiden to collective unconsciousness—and accelerated by the web—Art comes from beyond the self, comes from the network, or God. Claiming it is hubris.
Accepting the death of authorship recognizes and rejects the social mores that hamper an ability to freely use, modify and propagate artist’s work. However, it should be clear it’s not necessarily a radical commitment to anti-authorship in all instances. It is true that artists imprint their personal interpretation of the divinity they channel (secular: zeitgeist, collective unconsciousness, so accreditation, especially in the context of canonization, is very often relevant, e.g. to trace a chronology of work to best understand it in reflection with an on-going practice.