Nick Shinn, a veteran type designer who runs a leading Canadian type foundry, has tried it all. Big brands, newspapers, magazines, and large corporations have the budgets to order bespoke typefaces. Type designers also earn money from custom commissions. But most solo operators will at least consider entrusting their work to large e-commerce platforms like Adobe Fonts or Monotype, who have armies of sales and marketing people on staff. They can sell directly to customers through their website or sign up with independent sellers like I Love Typography, Fontstand, or Village. “Love for the craft sustains a lot of this,” Frere-Jones says.ĭesigners sell their work through various channels. The financial rewards for designers are rarely commensurate with their effort, and their work is often invisible in the blur of marketing campaigns and the oceans of text they’re used in-until a detail like letter spacing goes awry. “If you’re not into nuance, this really isn’t your business.” “You can describe our work as making really small decisions and projecting the implications of how every last thing that we do plays on each other,” explains Frere-Jones. Gotham, for instance, has 66 styles the sans serif Mallory that Frere-Jones designed has 110 weights, five widths, and supports a range of languages, from Acehnese to Zulu.ĭon’t ask a type designer to estimate how long it takes to make a font they’ll finesse a character-moving vector points and adjusting bézier curves pixel by pixel-until it looks just right. Quality typefaces are tweaked to ensure legibility when used in large billboards to the tiniest screens. A single typeface is redrawn in multiple styles-text, italics, condensed, bold, and variations in between. A type family can take months if not years to complete. The best ones possess twin geniuses in art and engineering, in addition to an enormous amount of foresight and patience. Beyond the tired jokes about Comic Sans and Papyrus is a serious industry that takes to heart the responsibility of shaping culture pixel by pixel.įonts are conceived, drawn, and produced by skilled designers who study art, computer programming, languages, and history. To understand the gravity of H&Co’s decision to sell to Monotype, a primer on how digital typefaces are made and sold may be useful. “With every new acquisition, it gets worse for the rest of us.” How fonts are made and sold It’s the future of our industry at stake and it’s never been this bad,” she tells Quartz. “I think it’s about time that I can speak more openly about this. She designed the official font for the city of Dubai, which is bundled in Microsoft Office. ![]() Chahine, who earned her PhD from Leiden University and a masters degree in International Relations from the University of Cambridge, is a legibility expert and a pioneer of Arabic typography. The impact of H&Co’s acquisition cannot be overstated, says Nadine Chahine, a celebrated Lebanese type designer and Monotype’s former UK type director. What do you think we would be watching? How much experimentation would there be? Would there be any pressure at all for this company that owns so much? It pokes right at the heart of what motivates so many of us, yet it’s exactly the thing that’s not part of their business model.” ![]() “Imagine if 70% of movie studios and TV production companies were owned by the same parent company. “The name ‘Monotype’ is a little too on the nose for what’s happening,” he observes. There were also some who defended Hoefler’s prerogative to steer his business however he pleases. ![]() Some commiserated with Hoefler’s longtime staffers who heard about the sale at the same time the public did others debated the scruples of Hoefler and his wife, Carleen Borsella, H&Co’s CEO, who left the company as soon as the deal was finalized to “explore new creative endeavors,” as the press release indicated. But the prospect of seeing the industry’s licensing practices streamlined was of little comfort to designers who flocked to social media and online fora like Type Drawers to process the shock of the H&Co sale. “A small foundry writes its own end-user license agreement, sometimes with legal counsel, sometimes without. “It just makes it easier for the customer,” he explains, drawing an analogy between font use and software licensing. Courtesy of Monotype Brands with ties to Monotype or H&Co fonts.Ĭharles Nix, a creative type director at Monotype, says that bringing H&Co’s assets under the company’s e-commerce umbrella simplifies the process of browsing and buying fonts.
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