for the most part, people have copyrighted the names of typefaces and their specific rendering of it as a software. If you want to make your own version of Helvetica, have at it. Just don’t call it Helvetica or copypaste the bezier curves into your work. Making a font from scratch is super hard work, so it’s no surprise people who make them want to charge money for their art.
edit: ‘making a good font from scatch is hard work…’
OH OH, I know why. So that when they send out a rush order to get a variable template set up for their collateral material, they don’t send the font that you can ONLY get from them, leading to a comedy of errors to get it to you, and everyone pissed off that you are taking so long to make what you can’t make because you don’t have the right fonts.
On copyright of fonts and typefaces.
Which is why the number of FOSS fonts that are actually any good is pretty small, while the number of crappy give-away fonts is large.
It actually made a certain amount of sense for the Underground, because prior to that, basically every single sign used a different font and it was making life difficult for travellers.
Johnston and (later) Gill Sans are at the root of a typically British typographic tradition that is visible all over the place even though AFAIK the companies that championed these fonts originally no longer use them themselves, they’re so iconic.
It’s not difficult to ‘design’ a font like the YouTube font, which just takes generic sans-serif letterforms and cuts some bits off. But a from-scratch design of a bespoke font is a tremendously time consuming, expensive, and difficult process. But it becomes a sort of status symbol for Silicon Valley businesses… you know you’ve really made it when your company has its own font!
Mine is Papasan Sans Type…
I am a freelancer with my largest client being a huge chip and radio business, let’s just arbitrarily call them Q.
They have a corporate font that isn’t half bad! An array of weights, decent kerning, some ligatures. They updated their look a year or so ago and rolled out a new, updated twist to their corporate font. Unique, got some decent character, then they declared that all presentations should just use MS Sans Serif (unless it is a C-suite exec show, then use the ‘fancy font’ - I swear to dog they actually said that in a training session). MS Sans Serif is a bad dog indeed, barely 1.5 weights (THAT is ‘bold’? offs!) and a gimpy ‘italic’. It is a real pleasure to work on the exec level shows let me tell you! At least print and ads and the social must also be in their ‘fancy font’.
He mentioned a charity that lost pounds, so I’m assuming he’s in the UK, where typefaces and fonts qualify for copyright, rather than just fonts qualifying for copyright in the US.
I’d clarify that making a readable text font is all of these. Designing a display or title font from scratch isn’t all that difficult if you can do some basic design in Illustrator and export to a free or inexpensive font design program. With pre-existing sketches as a source, I’ve designed and released a display font in less than 3 days. The fewer number of curves in the character shapes, the faster the design process goes.
Kinda surprised all their “UPDATE YOUR SOFTWARE NOW NOW NOW” messages aren’t in that font.
Exactly. That’s why they all look the same, or at most have a handful of “flourishes” like the IBM font. 99% percent of people would have a hard time even believing that most of these fonts were different looking at them side by side. What they really want is a font that looks like everyone expects, but which they control. A lot of that is even for good reason, whether it is to be free software compatible or to make it easier to add more language support. Someone can say “I saved us eleventy-gajillion dollars in licensing fees, strengthened our brand identity, and improved our products usability in emerging markets” and get promoted.
You should call it Papasan’s Sans Type Roger That Right Now
I’m guessing that he originally meant to call back to this in a paragraph about how some “custom” typefaces are actually cut-and-paste jobs, but forgot to add that. 'Cause otherwise… yeah, how WOULD that be illegal?
I try to warn my design clients of potential problems like this when they habitually send me a photo they found on Google Images and order me to use it as their featured image. 90% of the time they ignore me, which is why my contract specifies that it’s their problem and not mine.
You can’t copyright a typeface, per se. The outlines of the letters are not copyrightable. However, the way you digitally encode them, such as how you define the vectors, and the spacing between specific letters, the kerning pairs, and such can be copyrighted - it’s these exacting details that help make professional type faces look professional in contrast to some of the free ones you can download that have the same basic letter shapes.
I hope that your contract also has an indemnification clause that makes them pay any legal costs you could incur as a result of working for them. You could still be sued even though it was their request.
…in the US. Many other pats of the world allow copyright of the artwork of typefaces (per @simonize’s link above )
“He mentioned a charity that lost pounds, so I’m assuming he’s in the UK, where typefaces and fonts qualify for copyright, rather than just fonts qualifying for copyright in the US.”
That is so. In fact, the original Charity went bust as a result of the Typeface/font charges and got merged with another charity.
