About Font Garden
Font Garden is a free and open-source font publishing platform and AI lab built exlusivly on and for the SIL Open Font License (OFL). Our aim is to index, curate, fund, and improve the OFL font ecosystem using public blockchains for coordination, provide clean well engineered ethical training datasets for AI, and provide open-source AI models for automating font production within next generation font editors like Bezy and Fontra. It's basically a fork of Google Fonts on crypto rails, and we try to maintain compatibility with the Google Fonts ecosystem where possible. We intentionally diverge from the Google Fonts standards only in situations where there are alternative approaches that are better for large scale global collaboration and the OFL FOSS AI ecosystem. A core example of this is our prefrance for the UFO/Designspace format over the .glyphs and .glyphspackage formats.
This 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, AI, 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. Prices fall to the marginal cost of production
Previous attempts at digital monetization tried to create an artificial scarcity through paywalls and DRM, technically ineffective against any piracy but backed by socialized pressure and threats of legal action.
NFTâs are an alternative form of creating artificial digital scarcity, so itâs 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.
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 haveâor AI willâbut copyright law was a confusing and awkward historical aberration and works against memetic forms 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.
NFTâs solve the problem of trustless digital deeds of ownership, making the need to conflate ownership with content accessibility in copyable digital media outmodedâand with it, convoluted and invasive DRM solutions, unclear licensing rights and likely one day, paywalling altogether.