Comment by thaumasiotes 2 hours ago
> Creating type is an extremely difficult and skilled discipline and designers deserve to be compensated fairly.
Sure, if you need a custom font, you can pay someone to create it.
Once it exists, the creator has already been compensated fairly.
What a wild take. Might as well ask why anyone should pay for anything once it's been made.
While it's possible to commission a custom font and many companies do eg. Apple, IBM, Airbnb, Bytedance, Vercel, Github, Mozilla etc. Some even make them open source. However it's not really a viable option for anyone other than the largest organisations as it's far more expensive and time-consuming than just getting a licence unless your scale is such that a commission would be cheaper.
A font has approximately 6000 kanji characters. You could operate with some fraction of these. But still any reasonable time spend on each can add up to significant amount of hours. And you probably want this from reasonably skilled person and then add some review effort on top.