Phinney on Fonts About Thomas & the blog Phinney on Fonts main page

Picture of ThomasThomas “my other car is a sans serif” Phinney on fonts, typography & text. Geeky troubleshooting and info for font developers and users. Consulting & expert witness for fonts & typography.Read more...

Search:

“What does it cost to have a custom typeface designed?” »

June 15, 2024
0 - add yours »

“For example, how much would it cost (roughly) for someone like Hoefler to design a new font family for Mastercard?”
(Originally a Quora question, and my Quora answer. But given Quora’s increasingly anti-​user choices, I migrated the question here and updated my answer for current pricing.)

For a typeface of four styles, from a famous name type designer, with temporary exclusivity, you are probably looking at $100,000–250,000 and up as a rough ballpark. It might take them a year or more, although that won’t necessarily be full time on your typeface. This assumes no horribly extensive OpenType features, just basic ligatures and oldstyle figures, maybe small caps. I’m also assuming a western + CE character set (which is pretty common these days).

For ~ the same thing from a decently established but not famous type designer, you might expect to pay $30,000–75,000, roughly.

One rare public sharing of info about what a designer/​foundry “should” charge was from Bruno Maag of Dalton Maag, a fairly prestigious type designer /​ foundry. He wrote “IMO, I think that a price of around US$ 20-​25k per weight is appropriate for a Western European glyph set (ANSII), giving the client three years exclusivity. If they want to own the rights, double the price.” (December 2013 price quotation for a new custom font on typedrawers.com.) Add about 65% for inflation to 2024, then reduce that to only 50% because of heavy competition in type design, and that would make it about $30–38k per style.

So with permanent exclusivity, maybe double the price to USD $60–76K per style. Add CE coverage as well as exclusivity, but no small caps, and that “suggested price” perhaps goes to $70–88K per style. (Bruno says “weight” but presumably means style, so a regular four-​member family is four styles—although only two literal weights, plus their matching italics.)

From a designer early in their career, or based in a developing country, or if the customer has lower quality expectations than mine and is willing to go with somebody who does lower quality and faster work, or some combination of such factors, you could end up with considerably lower prices, as low as $8,000–25,000 per font style.

Now, all this gets kind of weird and warped once one gets into variable fonts. Those might be prices per master, and then add somewhere between a quarter and half again at the end, depending on how extreme the masters are.

Some designers (e.g. John Hudson at Tiro Typeworks) try to figure out how complex the typeface design is in general, and then charge a price-​per-​glyph for that typeface. They figure that easier and harder glyphs will average out over the whole set. This seems reasonable to me, and I gather he is happy with it. (I have tried to estimate work by actually assessing a difficulty multiplier individually on different glyphs, and that was an absurd amount of work. I do not generally recommend it unless you have a specific reason, such as needing to assess relative work done by different people on the same project.)

These are pretty rough guidelines, based on my own experience in soliciting fonts for development from a variety of type designers, what I have been paid, my discussions with other type designers, plus discussions among type designers in a couple of fora.

added to Economics, Type Design by Thomas Phinney
tags:, ,

“Do companies get sued for using fonts illegally?” »

May 27, 2024
0 - add yours »

Originally posted on Quora, in response to a user question. Due to Quora’s increasingly desperate and user-​hostile changes, I revised and reposted it here.
Last update 29 May 2024.

Yes, companies often get threatened with legal action, and (less often) if they do not pay for their font use, get sued. Many companies have been: (1) threatened with legal action, (2) pretty much forced to pay what they already should have, and/​or (3) sued for using fonts in unlicensed ways.

Sometimes (but rarely) these cases are dismissed. Usually they are settled, outside the courtroom. The only case I can think of that was even partially decided by the court was Adobe vs SSI, way back in 1998, wherein Adobe won a partial summary judgment on a number of key points. But even this was more a corporate piracy case involving people selling ripped-​off fonts rather than a normal business-​use case. In general, the business and personal use cases never get as far as being decided by a court.

Software and services have spring up around this. There are apps for managing fonts both for individuals and across organizations (Connect Fonts, FontBase, and others), and legal compliance concerns are part of their appeal. Some font management apps have been renamed (Suitcase Fusion and Universal Type Server are now Extensis Connect Fonts) or discontinued (so many, notably FontXplorer). There are entire businesses set up around font license compliance consulting, and services that help font foundries find unlicensed font use on the web (and optionally collect money for them).

Here are over 20 lawsuits around unlicensed font use. I have excluded cases where a type designer, font foundry or distributor has sued another type designer, foundry or distributor, although that happens occasionally as well.

Sometimes these things stop short of a lawsuit, but can still be pretty unpleasant. I don’t actually buy the old saying “there is no such thing as bad publicity”:

There exist multiple online scanners that look for fonts posted online or used in web sites. Some are owned by major retailers/​distributors, but at least one is available to any type designer or foundry that wants to pay for it (license infringement monitoring/​DMCA service aka Fontdata aka TypeSnitch) which might or might not be the same thing as Font Radar.

Heck, I won’t name the offending party, but in one of my day jobs, we once got a nasty cease-​and-​desist email from a lawyer from a well-​known font company—I knew the owners and had been to their offices! The lawyer claimed we were using two different fonts, in different ways, illegally. He was wrong, of course, but we still got the letter. (And never heard back from the lawyer when we explained how he was mistaken.)

Cases such as the one Sergey Yakunin cites of Sberbank with Fedra Sans and Fedra Serif are not unusual, it is just that one usually doesn’t hear about them. Often they are pursued without major public attention. Lots of negotiations behind the scenes, the foundry usually gets paid what they should have in the first place, and maybe not everyone is happy, but at least things are resolved in some vaguely reasonable way.

Here are a couple more high-​profile unlicensed use cases that are well-​known in the industry (discussed in public forums, etc.) but did not get major media attention:

For more like that, see also:

And finally, a general piece on font piracy, from Wired Magazine.

ADDENDUM

The original question I was answering on Quora featured these details in a comment (one of the things the “new Quora” unhelpfully suppresses!): “I am starting a new company. I have found a font that I want to use on my website (est. traffic 10 000/​month). I have purchased desktop license, though if I understand correctly, I am not allowed to use it on my website. Do companies actually get sued for using fonts illegally?”

For their particular case, I’ll point out that the licensing required, at that volume level, tends to be pretty cheap. They would waste more money-​as-​time reading the links in this post than just getting legal, either for a one-​time fee, or something like $25/​year (low-​end rate for Adobe Typekit). Or even free if one uses Google Fonts, though that would not get them the commercial fonts you are talking about.

Also, illegal use of a font on a web site is something you are doing in public, and accessible to web crawlers and the like—as previously mentioned above. I know of at least one general-​purpose service for scanning for illegal font use, and I know of at least one foundry that runs their own bots to scan for their fonts being used illegally. So if I was going to use a font illegally, the one way I definitely would not try to do so would be on a web site as a web font!

added to Economics, Font Detective by Thomas Phinney

Why Did Adobe Discontinue Font Chameleon in the 90s? »

February 22, 2023
3 - add yours »

Back in the mid to late 90s, Adobe acquired a company called Ares Software. Ares made font-​related software products, including doing the programming (but not owning or distributing) of Letraset FontStudio, which in its day was one of the best font editors. They are best known for a remarkable application and technology called Font Chameleon.

There is a popular myth that Adobe bought Font Chameleon to kill a threatening technology. Actually, no, removing it from the market was not a motivation for the acquisition. The team that made fonts and would have cared one way or another had nothing to do with those decisions, and were simply not interested in Font Chameleon.

Adobe’s purchase of Ares was done to acquire Font Chameleon technology, and was entirely driven by the PostScript group at Adobe, to use its technology for font compression purposes in PostScript 3 printers. All Ares retail products (not just Font Chameleon) were discontinued as Adobe put the two Ares principals to work on adapting the tech for Adobe’s use.

(Also, Font Chameleon was in some respects massively more powerful than MM, but also had huge limitations. It could only handle the axes it knew about, and could only handle the characters it knew about.)

I joined Adobe in mid-​1997, shortly after the acquisition, and thought it was an interesting tech. I ended up deeply involved in helping make the whole system work (chameleon fonts in ROM including CE fonts, printer drivers, and supposedly matching fonts on end user computers). All the systems were optimized to make an individual piece work in a static environment, according to known schema. Real end-​to-​end testing hadn’t been needed in years. But because there were numerous technical changes being made at the same time to all these pieces, suddenly end-​to-​end testing was critical. I got involved in pointing that out and pushing everyone to make sure their pieces played together instead of all pointing at specs that had been made before any of the pieces actually existed. 

Through some internal asking around at Adobe was able to get my hands on Ares’ Font Chameleon editor: the company’s internal tool used to make a Chameleon “font descriptor” that could be blended with others. These font descriptors as individual files were also super compact, which is why the PostScript team wanted the tech. They relied on a (large) mutatable “master” font , plus the descriptors; the master + descriptors for 136 PostScript 3 fonts were a LOT smaller than the set of fonts themselves, and allowed support for central European accented characters with hardly any size impact.

What was super interesting to me was how insanely fast it was to create such a font descriptor—which could also be exported as a stand-​alone font if one wished, not to mention instantly manipulated in weight, width, x-​height, etcetera. At the time I thought it could have been an incredible rapid prototyping tool. With it I could do in a day what would otherwise take me weeks. But the limitations of the tech, and tendency to encourage some degree of blandification meant… nobody in a position of power and influence within the type group was interested. They had looked at it, and decided it had inferior results and wasn’t worth pursuing.

It is also worth noting that the lead programmers from Ares were freakin’ brilliant, but the code was not entirely stable/​reliable. I certainly had quite a few crashes using the Chameleon editor—although to be fair, that was only intended as an internal app, not a retail/​external app.

So, Font Chameleon died because the Adobe team that bought it wanted it for underlying tech and didn’t do retail products, and the team that did retail fonts had no interest in it, and there was a general perception that maintaining/​developing any of the Ares products would have been painful.

added to Font Production, Font tools, Software, Variable Fonts by Thomas Phinney

Font Detective forensic typography assistant needed »

November 22, 2022
0 - add yours »

Hello, Watson!

UPDATE 25 DEC: Just thought I should say that yes I picked someone (out of many highly qualified—or even overqualified—applicants). They are choosing to stay anonymous for now, but have been doing a lovely job so far!

UPDATE 23 NOV: (1) Good lord, I have a lot of applicants. Application deadline will be Nov 24 at 8 am US Pacific time, and yes that is Thanksgiving for us. (2) By “very occasional, part-​time work” I mean maybe 3 hours, or 6, or 16, all in a week or two… and then maybe nothing for weeks or even months. This is just an occasional brief gig. Over time it might become more. Or perhaps not. The task of sample clipping is the main thing I have come up with, and will be an ongoing one. It is pretty darn tedious, sorry. (3) Added a couple more details in the body.

This is currently very occasional, part-​time work. Many of my cases from my detective work involve things like time consuming fiddly data collection, which I don’t have time to continue doing all by myself. A particular case at hand involves about a dozen documents. To demonstrate what the font is, part of my method involves taking samples of some specific letters (defined by me) from the documents. This amounts to clipping graphic images (from a PDF or image file, via Acrobat or Photoshop) and pasting them into a table (in Word or possibly InDesign). It is pretty rote work. In this case, like most of them, we already know what the typeface is when we go to do this clipping: the problem is to demonstrate that to the court. So, we take these laborious samples and make a pretty chart. And for a particular case at hand, instead of the usual one document and just maybe two, there are many. And a deadline in December.

I have more than a bit too much total work for the rest of this year, so I am looking for somebody to do this task, on this and future cases. Currently I define which characters are worth collecting samples of, but that is something I could potentially hand off in the future. Or perhaps we both pick some.

This could quite possibly lead to other work; it depends on your skills and what you bring to the table. There are times when I could use somebody to research some issue… I would give an example from a current case, but I definitely shouldn’t say it. Sigh.

The work pays well, and I am happy to share some of that. 

Email me if you have my email, or just use the comment function to give me your email address and a link to your resume or a description of your background. (I won’t publish these comments!) Obviously some design and typography background is a bonus, but then again, this is also pretty basic, for now. Brains are the most important resource. No promise of growth and advancement, but I certainly wouldn’t rule it out!

This will require signing a non-​disclosure agreement. I will let you know what you can say about any given case at hand, but it is often nothing, or pretty minimal. Even afterwards, most cases remain largely confidential. The ones we can talk about are a distinct minority.

added to Font Detective by Thomas Phinney
tags:,

Font Detective talk in Dublin, 16 Nov 2022 »

November 14, 2022
0 - add yours »

This Wednesday night at 6 pm, I will be doing a presentation about my font detective work in Dublin! Come on by—it’s free and no advance registration is needed. (Note however there is no on-​campus parking: transit or bicycle recommended, else park on the street nearby.) 

Location: TU Dublin, East Quad (I am told there will be a sign-​in desk at the entrance)
Time: 6 pm! will run maybe an hour to an hour and a half, with Q&A
Cost: Free!

I am in Dublin to do a Crafting Type workshop (Thurs–Sat) at TU Dublin, before a visit to London for one of my current cases! The good folks with Typography Ireland at the Uni asked me to do a wee talk about my forensic font work….

I shall discuss and show evidence from four forensic cases, including The Case of the Concealed Credits (featuring Justin Timberlake and will.i.am), the Respected Rabbi, the Canadian Caper, and the Secret of the Certificate. I am the world’s only ongoing “font detective”; as a global expert on fonts, typography and printing, I do font-​related document forensics in legal cases around the world. The stakes can be fortune, fame, careers, imprisonment, the family house, or the provenance of one of the world’s most valuable artworks.

Blackletter glyphs from The Secret of the Certificate
a different certificate, the s’micha from The Respected Rabbi

About me: I have been doing font forensics since I testified about a forged will back in 1999. My list of expert witness clients includes a “big three” auto maker and a major California city. I have been consulted on questioned documents by BBC News, The Washington Post, PBS television’s “History Detectives,” NPR, the US Treasury, and many others. I am also a type designer who has created fonts for Adobe and Google. I am the former CEO of FontLab, and previously had strategic/​technical font product management roles at Adobe and Extensis. I was on the board of ATypI, the international typography association, from 2004–20. I have four patents and a medal, as well as an MS in printing & typography from RIT, and an MBA from UC Berkeley.

added to Font Detective by Thomas Phinney

Font Production Person Needed, first half 2021 »

December 17, 2020
0 - add yours »

NOTE: The position has been filled! 

Qualifications:

Features

Details

WHAT? I have been commissioned to continue a variable font project I started this year with Google. In 2020, I did a first version with a weight axis, but now I need to do a big expansion in 2021—with two more axes. The work is primarily adding further masters to an existing typeface, not original design work. Given the desired timeline, there is too much work and not enough time for me to do it solo. 

WHEN? This would start at or near the beginning of January and run through May.

WHO? So I am looking for one more person to help work on it in FontLab 7; currently it is me plus some help from Vassil Kateliev. This will be work for hire, and the resulting typeface will be owned by Google (not open source). Vassil is our scripting guru, and can do some amazing things with automation—his contributions in that regard were invaluable in the version 1 project. This time he will likely also have some hands-​on production role. I will do considerable production work myself.

PUBLIC? Unlike some of my/​our recent projects, this isn’t open source, and I can’t yet talk about it publicly. For candidates who seem plausible, I will get you to sign an NDA with Google, and then I can tell you the details, and we can talk more!

MONEY. This involves a fixed amount of money, with the hours dependent on your experience/​productivity. Although I am doing the primary screening and will be supervising the work, you will negotiate pay with Google, and be paid by Google (monthly after the end of each month).

COMMENTARY. This is not artistically interesting work, but it is somewhat technically interesting, and you are working with some arguably nice people. Pay is OK, and it may lead directly or indirectly to future work. It will be a high-​profile project, but I am sorry to say it is not yet known if we will be able to talk about our contributions afterward.

DIVERSITY. Diverse applicants are especially welcome. 

Process:

Contact me with the form below. If you seem like a plausible candidate, I will have Google share a non-​disclosure agreement (NDA) with you; you signing the NDA will allow me to explain the job in more detail.

Note that getting the NDA requires your postal address, and company name if any.

added to Jobs, Type Design, Variable Fonts by Thomas Phinney
tags:

Science Gothic—Design/Production Person Needed »

July 29, 2019
0 - add yours »

(UPDATE: Applications are closed. I definitely have enough qualified people to consider! Anyone who expressed interest should have heard from me before 5 pm PST, August 6th, 2019.)

Today I got back a signed contract, commissioning Font Detective LLC to do a new version of the classic American Type Founders’ typeface Bank Gothic (Morris Fuller Benton, 1930–34), for Google Fonts.
UPDATE: We are calling it Science Gothic.

This will be a multi-​axis Variable Font. I have done a fair bit of prototyping, but there is lots of work ahead! And, given the timeline, too much work and not enough time for me to do it solo.

Freelance Type Design — Open Source Bank Gothic, FontLab VI

The new Bank Science Gothic will have an extended Latin and Cyrillic character set (about 1200 glyphs). It has weight, width and contrast axes, plus an oblique axis as well. I am looking for at least one more person (maybe two) to help work on it in FontLab VI; currently it is me and one p/​t person. 

The typeface has 3 x 3 masters for weight/​width, and then double that again for contrast (and again for italics, although that will be basically oblique and largely automated). Luckily the square-​geometric design is well-​suited to this treatment and makes for mostly easier editing.

An initial demo-​ready deadline will be the end of August. Full-​time availability preferred, although the first week or so may be a bit slower. Aiming to have the font final in late November. This will be work for hire, and the resulting typeface will be open source, and licensed under the Open Font License.

More Bank Gothic in use—it’s everywhere! (Avengers Endgame movie title in the film, for instance.) But this is our chance to make it massively more versatile and flexible, and available to everyone.

How to apply: email me directly, or just leave a comment here (I won’t publish it) with your email address. I will send a link to a more detailed job description and more info!

added to FontLab, Type Design, Variable Fonts, Web fonts by Thomas Phinney
tags:,

Career Change! »

April 25, 2019
4 - add yours »

In early June, I will be leaving FontLab! My Font Detective work continues to grow beyond what works with a full-​time day job. I am also looking for other gigs that are compatible with said investigations!

I am pleased with many things FontLab has accomplished for its customers in my time there, and have written about what we have done over on the FontLab blog. It has been a fun ride, and I wish my colleagues nothing but the best! But the time has come to move on and do other things.

What was once just occasional expert witness and related work has kept growing, and become quite frequent since I launched my “Font Detective” expert witness web site, a year ago—and even more so in recent months due to publicity around a particularly high-​profile case in Canada (see the Toronto Star and National Post articles).

But I can’t keep up with this, while also being full-​time CEO of FontLab. Yet the pay relative to time is excellent for the detective gig, it is quite fun, and I can imagine doing it part-​time into retirement 20 years from now… so rather than restricting it to a sideline, I am now doubling down on it.

This is a bit tricky, seeing as the detective work is incompatible with being full-​time CEO, yet also not quite at the volume/​reliability to fully replace that full-​time work. Hence, I am looking for other part-​time or temp gigs that are compatible with my “consulting font detective” work:

Talking about font detective cases at Typo San Francisco, 2012.
© 2012 Amber Gregory, FontShop, CC-​BY.
Contact Ms Gregory.
added to Admin & Meta, Font Detective, FontLab by Thomas Phinney
tags:, ,

Reliably Changing Versions of Fonts »

November 5, 2018
0 - add yours »

For people who design fonts, swapping versions of your font can be a problem, as your operating system or apps have font caches which may become confused when you replace your fonts on the fly. The app you are using a font in may sometimes still display/​use the old version, even though you replaced it! So for people who need to be absolutely sure they are getting the new version, here are some options. Note that latest versions of Adobe CC apps may recognize fonts swapped on the fly. Office 360 as well, at least on Windows. So if you are not having trouble, and you are swapping fonts some other way, good for you! But if you are having trouble, here are some more options.

Here are some approaches for reliably swapping versions of fonts that have the same internal names, to new versions. This applies to both Mac and Windows, and across all apps as well. When working this way, as best as I recall, in the past 10–15 years, I have only hit font caching problems once! I suspect that was just a failure to apply my method religiously enough. There are two options for fonts with the same internal names on the desktop, plus to avoid the problem entirely, there is an approach to making font names unique, and some links to web-​based test sites.

Option 1: Brute force (cross-​platform)

  1. Close apps that you are using the fonts in, particularly those which cache your fonts, including Adobe CC apps and Microsoft Office.
  2. Then, uninstall the “old” font version from your OS. Don’t just overwrite it in place with the new version! (If you are using a font management app, you can just deactivate, but I usually nuke them anyway, I don’t need 170 versions of the same font kicking around.)
  3. Relaunch those darn font-​caching apps, including Adobe CC apps and Microsoft Office. That’s after you uninstall the font. Even open a doc that uses the now-​missing font! This gives the app and its cache a chance to recognize the font is no longer there and update appropriately.
  4. Quit Office apps (without saving your docs, no need). Note: no need to quit Adobe CC apps, they can recognize newly-​installed fonts on the fly.
  5. Install your new font versions; or activate them in your font manager.
  6. If you are using Office apps with your fonts, you can launch them apps again and work normally.

Option 2: FontNuke (Mac only)

I forgot about this option for a while, but was reminded of it by James Montalbano in a thread on TypeDrawers. FontNuke is a Mac utility that clears font caches, and then reboots your system. It’s available through major utility aggregators like MacUpdate and CNet. I’ve used it occasionally, and it works fabulously. Downside: it requires a system restart. That’s why I ended up tending to go with Option 1. (Also, Mac restarts used to take longer than they do nowadays. Yay for SSDs!) Upside: if your system font caches have gotten messed up, or you don’t want to go through all the steps above, it becomes the simplest solution.

Option 3: Font Naming Tricks (cross-​platform)

Option 1 seem like too much freakin’ work? Or you need something that works on Windows, or reboots suck? I hear you. That’s why as a font designer, I sometimes work with a system where instead of keeping the internal names the same, I actually put the build version number right at the end of the gosh-​darned family name, so it shows in the menu with the version number. I also put it on the end of the file name. I leave it this way as long as possible during development. Sure, this has its limitations, as the new font won’t just automatically substitute for the old one in existing documents. And it has to be changed before releasing the font. But if I am in the midst of frequent font revisions, it also means I can swap out font versions constantly, as often as I like, and not worry in the least about my apps or OS getting confused. That is pretty sweet.

  1. Before generating the actual TTF or OTF font, increment a build number at the end of the font family name
  2. Remember that your existing docs won’t recognize this as being the same font family.  🙁  But you don’t have to worry about caching and conflicts! 🙂

Option 4: Test in the browser instead

If you don’t have to test in a desktop app, you can avoid a lot of grief! There are sites for testing fonts in a web browser. You can drag the font into a browser window and test it there. Impallari’s is great

If you are doing browser-​based font testing—or font testing anywhere, really—with an incomplete character set, consider Miguel Sousa’s Adhesion Text to get useful words for test purposes. (Don’t miss the options for other languages, and more!) 

added to Font Production, Making fonts work, Type Design by Thomas Phinney
tags:, ,

LA IDUG: Variable Fonts, Color Fonts & FontLab »

August 23, 2018
0 - add yours »

I will be presenting to the Los Angeles InDesign User Group (IDUG) on September 20, 2018 in Van Nuys, CA, for their 13th anniversary meeting! Come see the cool and even sometimes amazing things being done with variable fonts, as well as a bit on color fonts and how fonts are made.

Register free on EventBrite!

Be entertained and enlightened with the joys of variable fonts and color fonts in InDesign and friends. This demo night unlocks the secrets of OpenType variations, aka variable fonts and color fonts. Learn how they work, how you use them, and why they work the way they do. Bonus: some pointers on font creation and font editing.

You will learn:

Font Creation and Editing:

Color Fonts:

Variable Fonts:

added to Conferences & Speaking by Thomas Phinney
« Previous posts
Return to Top
Click to subscribe to my feed

Font Expert Witness & Consulting


Type Design & Font Creation Resources


Mastodon


Contact

Categories

Blog one theme by TopBlogger
© 2024 Thomas W. Phinney. Phinney on Fonts is powered by WordPress