i dream that an overworked, tired patent/copyright troll sends me a threatening legal notice for using something stupid like fonts or a a css class or a color hue ala pantone colors in a website of mine which threatens me with financial ruin by implicating me using DMCA or some american legislation..... i just want to experience this.
i don't have a legal notice fetish if that is what you are thinking, i just... want to see a stupid letter threatening me which i can laugh off.
remember TBP people had a public page many many years ago which had DMCA notices and their replies. That.....
Surely there's a better way to maximize the amount of these people's time you're wasting than to merely use the font and laugh when they send you a letter that you intend to ignore.
Like perhaps we compromise a site and switch the font so that they sue our target. I'm not sure what that target should be. Either another group of trolls that the world would be better off without, or we bait them into a fight they can't win. Get them to sue their own law firm or something.
As much as I'd enjoy watching Oracle and Adobe tear each other apart, we have to make sure that https://thetypefounders.com/ goes down with them. Presumably they have some kind of credentials with adobe? We need to frame them for the hacks (this development only to surface after Oracle and Adobe have sunk millions into this).
To manufacture a motive, we can plant evidence that whatever bunch of lawyers is behind the harassment believed that they could also make money from Oracle v Adobe.
Pantone don't own colors, what they own is the relationship between the name they have given and the color it represents.
So you can use the RGB representation of Pantone colors, no problem. You can also say "the logo color is Pantone XYZ". What you are not allowed to do is, for example, make an image processing tool that converts between Pantone color names and RGB values. And even that is debated.
Pantone is a color matching service. The idea is that you can say "use Pantone XYZ" and you know exactly how it will look like everywhere, be it on screen, in print, or as a plastic part, and Pantone business is to sell reference material that helps ensuring it is the case.
And you can't use Pantone on the web anyways, browsers don't support it (because they don't have a license), you will have to use RGB values or whatever CSS supports.
just humor me, what if we create a color matching service that actually does nothing but "shows" that it does work. it doesn't actually have to work, only get the pantone lawyers all excited
I hadn't looked at the business model for fonts for a while. Looking at https://store.typenetwork.com/ , each style of Proxima Nova (regular, bold, italic, etc) is priced à la carte, and for web use you can't really buy it, you rent it. Up to $1,015.00/year if you have 2.5M views/month.
Edit: Shared not because it's particularly relevant for the legal aspects, just for some relative idea of what it would cost if you did pay for a license from the party that's unhappy.
> The full Adobe Fonts library is cleared for both personal and commercial use.
> As with everything from Adobe Fonts, you can use these fonts for: ... Website Publishing: Create a Web Project to add any font from our service to your website
Either Adobe has a license, and the foundry is fucking up, or Adobe doesn't have a license, and Adobe has fucked up. In neither case should this be OP's problem.
At least as far back as 2018 there's also a distinction between using the font when designing website assets that will be graphics like JPEGs or PNGs, vs embedding the font files themselves to use for the text elements of the website.
Agencies used to get in trouble all the time back in the day for embedding font files in client websites that they had only licensed for offline use in Illustration/Photoshop/etc.
Web font licensing is completely bananas. The first one I clicked (Quiz) is $30.000 / year for unlimited pageviews - and that's self-hosted. A perpetual license is $150.000. Proxima Nova doesn't even offer a perpetual license at all.
Meanwhile, the exact same font is $30 for a perpetual desktop license. That allows you to create a logo in Photoshop and use that on your website - or use it for a printed document with tens of millions of copies. Or you can get an App license, which allows you to use it in a single app for $500 / year - regardless of the number of installations.
Web fonts are just a complete ripoff, it seems. Considering font faces can't even be copyrighted in the US, you'd be better off hiring someone to make a copy by tracing it!
That could be a misinterpretation. The Type Founders own his company. They own a lot of companies. Im not sure if I make the connection that he owns them all. He is not listed on The Type Founders team.
Why are you assuming that these are the same? Self-hosting is outside the normal expected use of the service as you are no longer using the service. Once you are self-hosting, they lose all ability to analytics on use of fonts and data about the users. If you take a font from their service as a self-hosted option, you might as well have retrieved the font from some torrent site (at least from their point of view).
I have seen several font license that sets limits on the number of uses per month. If you are some small little blog that maybe has 100 visitors a month, then the basic tier is for you. If you are some uber popular site, then you exceed the number allowed by basic tier licensing, and they expect you to pay for a much more expensive license. They can only track this when you do not self-host. We can discuss if we like this or not in another thread, but this is how they are wanting to operate.
The answer seems pretty straightforward. The web design firm has a license *for their own commercial use*, they do not have a license they can extend their *clients' ongoing commercial use.*
You can design a site for your client using Proxima Nova, but your client, as a commercial entity, needs their own license to continue using it in the market as they gain value from its use.
> Does my client need their own font license to use the designs?
> No, not if you are creating graphics or documents that have rasterized or properly embedded font data, such as a PDF, JPEG, or PNG.
> However, if your client needs to have the font installed to edit your design, they will need their own license, either through a Creative Cloud subscription or as a desktop license purchase.
"needs to have the fknt installed to edit your design" is referring to use the font on a computer, through some app. There's no mention of a client using the font on their website.
The relevant section in the FAQs is the following.
Can I use web fonts for my client websites?
The Terms of Use do not permit reselling beyond December 31, 2019. After that time, the client's website must load Adobe Fonts from their own Creative Cloud subscription to ensure that there isn't any interruption to the font licensing or web font hosting.
In the terms of services it is the following.
3.3 Use of the Licensed Content by Publishers on Whose Behalf You Create Websites.
Publishers on whose behalf you
create Websites must purchase their own subscription to the Service to continue using and displaying the Licensed Content
on their own behalf upon completion of the Website(s) . You may not host the Web Fonts or Web Projects for the Publisher
or resell the Service to them.
3.4 Obligations, Limitations, Restrictions, and Prohibited Uses of the Licensed Content.
[...]
(E) Prohibited Uses of the Licensed Content. Except as may be permitted pursuant to any open source license terms applicable to certain open source components that may be included in or distributed with the Licensed Content, you are expressly prohibited from:
(1) hosting the Licensed Content on your own server or other self-hosting option or service;
[...]
(11) hosting Web Fonts or Web Projects for your own customers or clients, or reselling the Service to them; and
The result is the same, the client requires a Creative Cloud subscription. Not sure why they would think what they are doing is allowed, this is neither hard to find nor hard to understand.
Basically, this Web design company used a proprietary font to make a website for a client, that they then included as a self-hosted font file for the website that they deployed. They only had access to this font through their Creative Cloud SaaS license, which almost certainly doesn't let them take the proprietary IP they have access to and resell it in a package to anyone that pays them.
I don't think it's unreasonable of the owner of the IP to ensure that their IP doesn't effectively become freeware just because they signed a bulk license with Adobe. It would be like, because you licensed your song to Spotify for a per-play fee, that would mean anyone can rip it from Spotify and use it in an ad without a license?
It also doesn't seem onerous for the web designers to ask their clients to buy a copy of the font that they specified. I've had to do that for websites before.
OP states "We have used the font Proxima Nova on a website for our client using the Adobe Web Project method."
This method is not self-hosting. If I go click the "add to web project" button, it gives me a `<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://use.typekit.net/foobar.css">` embed to use.
Unlike a patent, a copyright only protects a specific expression. There's nothing stopping you from using said typeface on a computer. If it's so easy to clone, why not just clone Proxima Nova and be in the clear?
What exactly is copyright law stopping people from doing? It's literally only protecting their work in the font. If they did a lot of work, you can't call selling it "rent-seeking" and surely it's worth protecting and incentivizing. If they did little work, then little is protected. Anybody can use it by doing an even smaller amount of work.
What? These things take ludicrous amounts of time to produce, on top of several years of experience to gain the baseline skills required to make a typeface that's even remotely palatable.
We absolutely should preserve commercial incentive for people to make IP of such importance (both functionally and artistically).
Exactly, this is why every typeface you see in the world is a free one. /s
Nothing is stopping people from making nor using free fonts and yet many people and organizations freely choose to spend thousands of dollars on something that they perceive to be "better."
If we made it illegal to charge money for, we would have just as many good fonts as we do now. We should just change the law to outlaw making money this way.
What? Why would someone spend decades of their lives mastering a craft like typeface design if there were no way to make money from it? How could someone justify it?
That is like asking how could linux exist. Use your brain and imagine. We would likely have many more great fonts than we do today if you outlawed charging for them because people would no long have a protectionist mindset. It would be easy for people to modify existing ones so they worked better for various issues, and it wouldn't stop people creating beautiful new ones for whatever reason they wanted like art... or like linux. Sometimes the world works better without capitalism though that might be hard to believe.
You are aware that Linux is in fact supported by commercial enterprises of various sizes all up and down the value chain, right?
And yeah, it’s great that we happened upon a quasi-religious movement in software that has managed to align itself with commercial interests. OSS, in my opinion, will go down as one of humanity’s greatest achievements.
Want to know why it’s such an achievement? Because it was profoundly unlikely and continues to be difficult in all sorts of ways.
Question: What’s your job and your approximate hourly rate? Is it something that requires years or decades of training and do you charge $0?
Yes, I'm aware, but if none of those companies existed linux would still be doing great. Same way that if we made it so you couldn't charge for fonts the entire ecosystem would still be doing great. We don't need the rent seeking.
Don't think they're "meant to be IP" ? Too bad; they are.
Don't think fonts matter ? Use Comic Sans MS the rest of your life, go ahead.
If I develop a website for someone and pay for Oracle, that does not grant free Oracle licenses to everyone I hand my work off to. Why would anyone think that ? s/Oracle/OpenAI/g. s/Oracle/whatever you make money on/g.
Just because one doesn't value the work of font creators doesn't mean the rest of us must commoditize their work.
You might think there are huge networks of font pirates creating even-better fonts than those run-of-the-mill paid fonts, but it's just a fantasy.
We were typekit users before it was acquired by Adobe. Creating font kits on behalf of clients for websites that you host was standard practice.
It was only last year that I discovered that Adobe has changed the license terms so that it’s no longer permitted. At the same time you can also no longer take out a subscription solely to Adobe fonts - it’s only available as part of a Creative Cloud subscription.
So in order to comply with license terms a client has to take out a subscription for an Adobe product e.g Photoshop in order to legally use a font on their website.
Any wonder why most designers despaired on hearing of the Figma purchase?
Figma was a VC-funded company. What reason was there to believe they’d do things differently in the long run?
It’s like Lucy and the football. Users are the Charlie Browns who will try their luck with proprietary software again and again, only to have it yanked away when inevitably it gets acquired / goes public / merges with an evil ad company (like what happened to Unity) / etc.
This is a good example of where it would be beneficial for cloud bundles to behave a little more like medical insurance in the united states. You start with a lower monthly fee, you pay for what you use up to a maximum, and then hit the cap.
It lets someone buy a subscription for just one thing like fonts, and then by the time you are using three to four products the suite covers itself.
All of that should happen automatically without getting stuck in a subpar tier for year, or being unable to downsize when you stop using a product.
It's the weirdness of the fact that the client has to buy a completely unrelated product in order to get the thing they need.
Typekit used to cost around £50/year - and allowed agencies to use webfonts on their client sites. Now the clients have to spend £26.50 / month on a product they don't actually need in order to get a font on their website...
Was $50/year a loss to grow the business? Did that actually cover the under the covers licensing cost? The font in question is considerably more expensive on its own.
From an intuition standpoint, I would NOT expect my license of web fonts to extend to a client I’m selling my work to. My null hypothesis would be that there is an additional license to acquire.
We switched away from this font because even though we had a lifetime multi-site commercial license from the previous owner of the font, we were constantly getting legal threats from the current owners The Type Founders. Like several times a year we had to put together paperwork to show we could legally use it. I feel like you should have to do some minimum amount of research before demanding a cash settlement from someone.
Why pay for your own lawyers when you can make the other person pay theirs instead? Plus they might decide it is not worth the effort and just settle. It is very rare for companies to be punished for abusing the legal system this way, and usually only after years or decades of flagrant abuse.
Scammers are sending me geeksquad invoice emails every week. Scammers sent fake invoices to GOOG and META and receive 100m for it [1]. This feels no different, just scan for sites using your font and send invoices frequently whether they have a license or not. It's a very hacker/scammer type of approach to making money, or I guess you could call it a private equity font-industry-vertical 10x secret sauce.
They're sending people a bunch of invoices without any due dilligence. You're going to get companies that double pay because they're not sure/don't have time to review licensing contracts. The business model is very scam inspired.
Interesting fact: at least in the US, font files themselves can be copyrighted, and thus the exact coordinates of each glyph, but the general shape cannot. You can rasterise a font, trace the result, and turn that back into a vector font file, and change the copyright that way. Hence why there are so many free alternatives of otherwise restrictively licensed fonts, that look identical.
I think the font is seen as (analogous to) a "computer program". You can put the bezier control points in different locations but end up with the same shapes of curves overall. Same result (visually), but created with a different "computer program".
It does, but it's still a different creative expression. You could legally recreate Microsoft Word pixel-for-pixel and just change the name without copyright issues because the code creating the exact same shapes would have differences and, most importantly, not be a literal copy but a recreation.
You might be covered for copyright claims, but it sounds like you wouldn't necessarily be in the clear when it comes to design patent infringement claims.
It was viral for a period in the early 2010s, a kinda mix between a Grotesk (like helvetica) and Futura. Kinda like Helvetica for those who wanted more 'feeling'. But it's a bit stale by now TBH.
Adobe provides adding fonts from their CDN and they are hosting Proxima Nova: https://fonts.adobe.com/search?query=Proxima%2Bnova.
Looks like OP is using it from Adobe's CDN and now their client is being chased by the owner of the font.
Wonder if Adobe is not paying (any/appropriate) licensing fees to the owner of the font?
Call me a bit utilitarian or risk averse, but to me it seems that the free fonts out there cover basically all of the use cases that I could have. Surely there are enough fonts like that to fit most of the designs that you could conceivably come up with?
Or do people really look at a font that might cost thousands of USD to use, like Proxima Nova (https://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/proxima-nova) and go: "Yes, this is exactly what fits my creative vision and nothing less will do!"
Not that it wouldn't be worth the price tag for some, but to me that feels like something that only large enterprises for which that's a rounding error might want to do.
I think it's more that the convenience of Adobe's library of proprietary fonts is appealing to (and relatively inexpensive for) most designers.
In my opinion, anything longer than a slogan will probably benefit from the tried-and-tested nature of pedestrian typefaces, and is not the right place for excessive design flair. Nonetheless, it is not trivial to install and manage fonts, nor to understand the licensing obligations of free fonts.
depends, if you want a consistent font across a website it's hard with free fonts, because these usually come in bold/regular/italic and that's it, professional font will come with all combinations with wide and narrow lettering on top, plus light and black, so it will cover everything from titles to footers, with a good coverage of unicode glyphs on top of it.
the free ones that come close, like the dejavu font family, are very few and overused.
There is one reply to the same comment as yours with a free font that looks pretty much like this one that has about 3 times as many styles as it. And all of them look fine.
What I've learned is that people go insane when it comes to fonts, and sometimes they have good typographical reasons for it, and sometimes they just have strong opinions. Discussions like this bring both types out, and sometimes they're both right.
I'm a typography fan, but let's admit it - 90% of the world population could live in world where Courier and Comic Sans would be the only fonts avaiable and would not notice a thing.
Jokes aside, given all four combinations of serif/sans * proportional/monospace, with a good variety of weights and italics, and you’ll have covered the vast majority of use cases.
But, the reality is 99.9999% of websites can use one of the free Google fonts. The other .0001% could too, but they want to show that they are not like all the other websites.
The ability of readers to identify a font is largely orthogonal to the psychological/emotional impact it has on them. Designers use distinctive fonts because they transmit a, mostly subconscious, feeling—reliability, innovation, vision, purpose, etc. This is usually tied to a brand and becomes a major part of a company's image, in which case it is crucial to the company's market reach. This is why there are many logotypes that consist of nothing more than the company name in a specific font. Typefaces are _that_ powerful.
So, yes, people would notice if most brands started "feeling" the same.
Not sure what you mean by "serious", but this is well known in design circles. Maybe this[1] will convince you?
Typography is visual design after all, and is not any different from other design elements we see all around us. It's obvious that it has an impact in how we perceive and experience brands, and the source of any text we read.
Thank you. Also found additional discussion in https://designmodo.com/font-psychology. I'm still skeptical that there is anything intrinsic about the meanings specific fonts convey outside of being used in previous contexts (e.g. conveys "fashionable" because it's overused in fashion industry, per one example). That said, I'm more open to the idea of font psychology now.
That study was funded by Monotype, a company with an incentive to find the result they found. Is it any more credible than other corporate funded research?
That study is interesting to understand the psychological effects of typography. It's not needed to prove that typography _has_ a psychological effect, which we've known for decades.
A sibling comment pointed out font psychology, which you might want to look into. Most of this is rooted in visual design, which is an inexact science, so you probably won't find the type of studies you want to see, for the same reason you won't find studies about other art forms.
Do you not believe in subconscious psychological effects of esthetic choices in general, or just when it comes to typography? If the latter, what about type makes it different from things like color, position, hierarchy, etc.?
Sure, I can see the subtle differences, but one costs $1650 for all styles, the other one is free. Most of the letters seem to be only stretched vertically by a few percent, with no other visible differences. If I had a job to create a new font, I wouldn't have the guts turning this in as my original work.
And since most people's jobs are not creating fonts, most people wouldn't notice the difference. There-in lies the challenge. Typography /is/ important, but it may not be as important as typographists think that it is.
(I tell this story a lot.) I heard an ad on the radio a while back, from the American Podiatry Association, which recommended that everybody should schedule a checkup with their podiatrist once a year to maintain foot health.
I am sure that 95% of podiatrists honestly believe that's good and important advice. Just as 95% of font designers honestly think that subtle differences in kerning are strongly impactful.
>"Yes, this is exactly what fits my creative vision and nothing less will do!"
It's more like: you are sitting in a room with the c suite, and the design firm they hired to refresh the brand. The design firm sells the c suite on "this font exemplifies who you are and you you want to represent yourself to the world as." Then you chime in and say it looks like every other font and there are legal licensing issues, and the c suite tells you that you are chicken little and the design firm knows what they are doing and will take care of it. They are the experts not you. Why are you even in this meeting?
The last time I worked somewhere that brought in outsiders to refresh the brand, the font they ended up standardizing on was .... Proxima Nova.
tell you they want it installed on all desktop computers and all word templates changed to use it, ignoring mobile only people, and the fact that your brand standards will appear for the purchasing department but not anybody outside the company you send the documents to,
need to be talked out of using it in email signatures, and that the only safe option is Arial. Which they could have just picked for everything in the first place,
ignore the brand standards themselves because conforming to them takes too much time and attention paying.
Pretty soon they will forget they even standardized the company on a font, but the mess will still linger.
> Or do people really look at a font that might cost thousands of USD to use...
This is part of the business problem that the Adobe CC subscription solves. I you already have a subscription, which is relatively inexpensive and bundled with Adobe software licenses, then the marginal cost of using a particular font in their library is zero.
That said, I've also had a role on the client side and, yes, we spent quite a lot of time discussing which of the font options presented by our designer we preferred and would have happily spent a thousand or two dollars on the one we liked best. Although it seems like a lot for a font, it would have been a very small part of the total budget for the project.
As it happened, though, we were simply presented with a total budget for the project, without a line item for font licensing. Either our designer has some sort of CC-style library license, or it was just rolled into the bundled price. In theory, then, maybe the designers have an incentive to use cheaper fonts in situations like this. But it's probably the designers on their team that most want to use the pricey fonts.
I'm not an expert in this area but, according to Adobe, it depends on the use. For rasterized images, PDF documents, etc., the answer seem to be 'yes':
> Does my client need their own font license to use the designs? No, not if you are creating graphics or documents that have rasterized or properly embedded font data, such as a PDF, JPEG, or PNG.
> However, if your client needs to have the font installed to edit your design, they will need their own license, either through a Creative Cloud subscription or as a desktop license purchase.
But for websites, the answer seems considerably more complicated but, essentially, 'no.'
> Can I use web fonts for my client websites? The Terms of Use do not permit reselling beyond December 31, 2019. After that time, the client's website must load Adobe Fonts from their own Creative Cloud subscription to ensure that there isn't any interruption to the font licensing or web font hosting.
> Please refer to the full Terms of Use for more information on what reselling the service means, and related definitions. . . . [A few more paragraphs about how to switch things over from your CC account to a client's.]
Reading between the lines there just a little bit, it seems like Adobe may have run into its own licensing issues. And this all depends on Adobe being correct that they have gotten a license from the creator of the font that allows Adobe, in turn, to convey these rights to the CC subscriber. Uncertainty on exactly these points--Does Adobe allow clients to use the fonts without their own subscription? Does Adobe itself have the rights to allow this?--seems like the root of the issue in the article:
>The one useful Adobe representative we spoke to on the phone last week mentioned that numerous people are having trouble with the Adobe licencing with this particular font. She said that Adobe may not have the appropriate licencing for this font listed on the website – unsure if this is reliable information or not, but thought I’d mention, as if this is the case, there should be more information clearly visible on the font’s webpage about how to use it correctly.
>From our understanding, we have used the font in the correct way (according to the Adobe Web Project method). However, our client does not have an Adobe subscription, so we concerned that we are not covered by the Adobe licence due to this: https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html.
I love Adobe. They just keep f*king people over and over again and people still use their products. This is like Microsoft a few decades ago. The only Adobe product that I still use is Figma. Everything else I refuse to use when being asked to.
In fairness, this seems like it isn't Adobe's fault. The designer of the font created a PE firm that only sues people for using it under changed terms of their choosing.
I get that OP didn't manage to find the answer to their question in the FAQ, but tier 1 support basically exists to direct people to the FAQ answer they are looking for. Instead Adobe paid for at least 13 support calls of labor. Which from the employee standpoint seems to suggest that head count can be justified just by providing a worse service.
I received a similar email from Type Founders despite the fact that my website does not provide or even specify a specific font to use (besides things like size and sand serif). I got the impression it was either a shakedown or a very broadly aimed and poorly executed attempt to recovering licensing fees.
Didn't we already do this with desktop software and stock images ages ago? Speculatively a comment on the Adobe says that The Type Founders is private equity backed. That makes sense if they are trying to capture revenue that has been forgone out of license management difficulties. Once they prove the legalities and revenue stream, sell it to Adobe or IPO.
Nobody likes to hear it, but I think there is an opportunity for blockchain here.
Like any piece of software, fonts are licensed for specific uses. The kind of license you need is determined by how you will be using the fonts and what you will be using them to create. [...]
A web license lets you serve the fonts on a website and use them as live, dynamic text via HTML and @font-face CSS. The cost is determined by the specific fonts licensed, the approximate number of monthly page views the websites using the fonts receive, and the length of the license in years.
Font/typeface licensing and IP is a nightmare. Typefaces cannot be copyrighted, but fonts can. As a practical matter, this means that representations of typefaces in rendered documents can be redistributed freely - but the font file can be copyrighted, which means that anything that loads the font file (e.g. your website) has to have a license to use the font.
So - if this font was being used in just a few places, they could easily convert that text to images and be fully compliant (though obviously hacky). However, since they're loading it as a web font, now they have to pay.
It gets weirder when you talk about productivity software - lots of companies believe that they "own" their fonts, and hence can use them in their documents with impunity. In reality, they likely have an unlimited organization usage license, which allows them to install the font files on every computer in the organization, but not to distribute them outside of their organization. Have a design agency that you hire to build slide decks for the sales team? They need to buy a license to use that font (or you buy it for them).
This also creates a reason to distribute documents in rendered form - wonder why that marketing deck got emailed to you from a vendor as a PDF instead of the PPT? If it uses a licensed font, you probably don't have a license and consequently won't have the font file installed on your computer, which causes the document to fall back to an alternate font (with mixed results)
This is often true even when the font was custom-designed for a particular company - if it's a custom version of an existing font, the foundry typically creates a one off license for that customer.
This is also why Google Docs and Slides can't support custom fonts - in their model, the fonts are delivered over the browser, so there's no way to limit distribution of documents with those fonts to remain in compliance with the foundry licensing. (Disclosure: I'm a googler, I worked on google slides years ago, got a ton of requests for custom fonts, out of 30+ companies that asked for this, only two owned their fonts in such a way that they could actually be distributed without limits).
We are posting our message that we shared on the Adobe forum here, too, to ensure anyone with questions or concerns can see it.
We wanted to take this opportunity to offer our thoughts here. The Type Founders (or TTF) launched in 2021 and our mission is to develop an extensive library of high-quality, distinctive, and usable typefaces. We are a small team of individuals who love all things typographic and have dedicated our careers to advancing the interests of type designers and all users of type. Underneath the TTF umbrella are 27 type foundry brands and a library of 7,000+ fonts, many of which are available on Adobe Fonts. The vast majority of type designers behind these foundries remain actively involved, drawing and publishing new fonts. As custodians of these legacies and the craft, it is our business to work with those designers to help their typefaces flourish. One aspect of that is ensuring that their work is properly licensed.
The discipline of type design is uniquely positioned at the intersection of art, history, culture, and engineering. As new technologies and content platforms take hold — such as dynamic websites, mobile apps, and streaming platforms — font software and licensing have evolved from the days of buying a case of wood type to receiving a CD with a couple hundred fonts to downloading files onto your computer or accessing them directly from the cloud. This inevitably leads to some confusion about what is and is not covered by certain licenses, especially as no common license exists in our industry — a topic we spend a great deal talking about at font conferences (yes, those are actually a thing!). With Adobe Fonts, Adobe has built an amazing service for Creative Cloud subscribers, and we are lucky to be one of their partners. The Adobe Fonts library has thousands of great typefaces for any project and the service is easy to use and seamlessly integrates into Adobe apps. The font license included is straightforward, but there are a few nuances, which likely explains the confusion and frustration on this thread and why our representatives may have reached out to you to verify licensing for one of our fonts. After this letter, we will address those points specifically.
Developing well-crafted typefaces requires years of training — including specialized design and technical skills — and often involves collaboration with other designers and engineers. We understand that receiving an email telling you that you are in the wrong or asking you to purchase a license for something you thought you already owned may be frustrating but unfortunately type designers are not fairly compensated for their work if their fonts are not properly licensed, including how fonts on Adobe Fonts are used.
As mentioned above, the TTF team cares deeply about type design and typography and are here to answer any questions you might have about Adobe Fonts, font licensing in general, or anything at all related to type. Don’t hesitate to reach out at any time: info@thetypefounders.com.
Thank you from the TTF team!
— Aaron, Bram, Dan, Ivan, Jill, Marina, Paley, Richard, Sam, and Tiffany
= = = = = = = = =
To address some of the questions raised on the Adobe thread, any font on Adobe Fonts can be used for personal and commercial projects, with a few exceptions, as outlined in Adobe’s font licensing FAQ (https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html). This includes using the fonts on websites as long as you follow Adobe’s instructions (https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/add-fonts-website.html). In practical terms, for web use via Adobe Fonts, this means:
1. You need to use the Adobe Fonts web font hosting service (or CDN) to serve the fonts to your website.
2. If y...
It strikes me as a bit disengenuous to claim that you're going hard on license enforcement because "type designers are not fairly compensated for their work if their fonts are not properly licensed". While this might be a true statement generally, type designers don't actually own the fonts that fall under the "TTF umbrella", do they? Aren't they all now owned by you? So you and your private equity investors are the ones reaping the profits when you act aggressively on license enforcement, and not the designer/s? And by not being clear about this, you're ironically giving independent type designers a bad name by leading people to believe that it's the designers driving these efforts?
113 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadi don't have a legal notice fetish if that is what you are thinking, i just... want to see a stupid letter threatening me which i can laugh off.
remember TBP people had a public page many many years ago which had DMCA notices and their replies. That.....
Lawyers aren't going to help when the judges themselves are corrupted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
Are you familiar with the UK's TV licensing notices? Those are really funny
Like perhaps we compromise a site and switch the font so that they sue our target. I'm not sure what that target should be. Either another group of trolls that the world would be better off without, or we bait them into a fight they can't win. Get them to sue their own law firm or something.
To manufacture a motive, we can plant evidence that whatever bunch of lawyers is behind the harassment believed that they could also make money from Oracle v Adobe.
Pantone don't own colors, what they own is the relationship between the name they have given and the color it represents.
So you can use the RGB representation of Pantone colors, no problem. You can also say "the logo color is Pantone XYZ". What you are not allowed to do is, for example, make an image processing tool that converts between Pantone color names and RGB values. And even that is debated.
Pantone is a color matching service. The idea is that you can say "use Pantone XYZ" and you know exactly how it will look like everywhere, be it on screen, in print, or as a plastic part, and Pantone business is to sell reference material that helps ensuring it is the case.
And you can't use Pantone on the web anyways, browsers don't support it (because they don't have a license), you will have to use RGB values or whatever CSS supports.
Edit: Shared not because it's particularly relevant for the legal aspects, just for some relative idea of what it would cost if you did pay for a license from the party that's unhappy.
https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/proxima-nova
> Licensing Information
> The full Adobe Fonts library is cleared for both personal and commercial use.
> As with everything from Adobe Fonts, you can use these fonts for: ... Website Publishing: Create a Web Project to add any font from our service to your website
Either Adobe has a license, and the foundry is fucking up, or Adobe doesn't have a license, and Adobe has fucked up. In neither case should this be OP's problem.
Agencies used to get in trouble all the time back in the day for embedding font files in client websites that they had only licensed for offline use in Illustration/Photoshop/etc.
It doesn't say "...add any font from our service to websites for your clients", though.
Meanwhile, the exact same font is $30 for a perpetual desktop license. That allows you to create a logo in Photoshop and use that on your website - or use it for a printed document with tens of millions of copies. Or you can get an App license, which allows you to use it in a single app for $500 / year - regardless of the number of installations.
Web fonts are just a complete ripoff, it seems. Considering font faces can't even be copyrighted in the US, you'd be better off hiring someone to make a copy by tracing it!
>Simonson designed Proxima Nova, his fonts now owned by The Type Founders, a private equity-backed entity.
https://thetypefounders.com/#foundries
I have seen several font license that sets limits on the number of uses per month. If you are some small little blog that maybe has 100 visitors a month, then the basic tier is for you. If you are some uber popular site, then you exceed the number allowed by basic tier licensing, and they expect you to pay for a much more expensive license. They can only track this when you do not self-host. We can discuss if we like this or not in another thread, but this is how they are wanting to operate.
You can design a site for your client using Proxima Nova, but your client, as a commercial entity, needs their own license to continue using it in the market as they gain value from its use.
Edit:
Found this in the Adobe Font Licensing FAQ (https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html#act-...), issue settled:
> Does my client need their own font license to use the designs?
> No, not if you are creating graphics or documents that have rasterized or properly embedded font data, such as a PDF, JPEG, or PNG.
> However, if your client needs to have the font installed to edit your design, they will need their own license, either through a Creative Cloud subscription or as a desktop license purchase.
This is clearly a case of the second option.
"needs to have the fknt installed to edit your design" is referring to use the font on a computer, through some app. There's no mention of a client using the font on their website.
Can I use web fonts for my client websites?
The Terms of Use do not permit reselling beyond December 31, 2019. After that time, the client's website must load Adobe Fonts from their own Creative Cloud subscription to ensure that there isn't any interruption to the font licensing or web font hosting.
In the terms of services it is the following.
3.3 Use of the Licensed Content by Publishers on Whose Behalf You Create Websites.
Publishers on whose behalf you create Websites must purchase their own subscription to the Service to continue using and displaying the Licensed Content on their own behalf upon completion of the Website(s) . You may not host the Web Fonts or Web Projects for the Publisher or resell the Service to them.
3.4 Obligations, Limitations, Restrictions, and Prohibited Uses of the Licensed Content.
[...]
(E) Prohibited Uses of the Licensed Content. Except as may be permitted pursuant to any open source license terms applicable to certain open source components that may be included in or distributed with the Licensed Content, you are expressly prohibited from:
(1) hosting the Licensed Content on your own server or other self-hosting option or service;
[...]
(11) hosting Web Fonts or Web Projects for your own customers or clients, or reselling the Service to them; and
The result is the same, the client requires a Creative Cloud subscription. Not sure why they would think what they are doing is allowed, this is neither hard to find nor hard to understand.
Basically, this Web design company used a proprietary font to make a website for a client, that they then included as a self-hosted font file for the website that they deployed. They only had access to this font through their Creative Cloud SaaS license, which almost certainly doesn't let them take the proprietary IP they have access to and resell it in a package to anyone that pays them.
I don't think it's unreasonable of the owner of the IP to ensure that their IP doesn't effectively become freeware just because they signed a bulk license with Adobe. It would be like, because you licensed your song to Spotify for a per-play fee, that would mean anyone can rip it from Spotify and use it in an ad without a license?
It also doesn't seem onerous for the web designers to ask their clients to buy a copy of the font that they specified. I've had to do that for websites before.
This method is not self-hosting. If I go click the "add to web project" button, it gives me a `<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://use.typekit.net/foobar.css">` embed to use.
This is evidenced by the fact that no one seems willing to clone popular typefaces because making a font is a lot of work even if you have a guide.
I always get angry about "x but on a computer" patents, and the "typefaces ... but on a computer" court case lights a similar fire in my belly.
> This is evidenced by the fact that no one seems willing to clone popular typefaces because making a font is a lot of work even if you have a guide.
The 1,000,000 Helvetica clones out there disagree with this statement
What exactly is copyright law stopping people from doing? It's literally only protecting their work in the font. If they did a lot of work, you can't call selling it "rent-seeking" and surely it's worth protecting and incentivizing. If they did little work, then little is protected. Anybody can use it by doing an even smaller amount of work.
We absolutely should preserve commercial incentive for people to make IP of such importance (both functionally and artistically).
Nothing is stopping people from making nor using free fonts and yet many people and organizations freely choose to spend thousands of dollars on something that they perceive to be "better."
And yeah, it’s great that we happened upon a quasi-religious movement in software that has managed to align itself with commercial interests. OSS, in my opinion, will go down as one of humanity’s greatest achievements.
Want to know why it’s such an achievement? Because it was profoundly unlikely and continues to be difficult in all sorts of ways.
Question: What’s your job and your approximate hourly rate? Is it something that requires years or decades of training and do you charge $0?
Don't like paid fonts? Don't use them.
Don't think they're "meant to be IP" ? Too bad; they are.
Don't think fonts matter ? Use Comic Sans MS the rest of your life, go ahead.
If I develop a website for someone and pay for Oracle, that does not grant free Oracle licenses to everyone I hand my work off to. Why would anyone think that ? s/Oracle/OpenAI/g. s/Oracle/whatever you make money on/g.
Just because one doesn't value the work of font creators doesn't mean the rest of us must commoditize their work.
You might think there are huge networks of font pirates creating even-better fonts than those run-of-the-mill paid fonts, but it's just a fantasy.
It was only last year that I discovered that Adobe has changed the license terms so that it’s no longer permitted. At the same time you can also no longer take out a subscription solely to Adobe fonts - it’s only available as part of a Creative Cloud subscription.
So in order to comply with license terms a client has to take out a subscription for an Adobe product e.g Photoshop in order to legally use a font on their website.
Any wonder why most designers despaired on hearing of the Figma purchase?
It’s like Lucy and the football. Users are the Charlie Browns who will try their luck with proprietary software again and again, only to have it yanked away when inevitably it gets acquired / goes public / merges with an evil ad company (like what happened to Unity) / etc.
This is a good example of where it would be beneficial for cloud bundles to behave a little more like medical insurance in the united states. You start with a lower monthly fee, you pay for what you use up to a maximum, and then hit the cap.
It lets someone buy a subscription for just one thing like fonts, and then by the time you are using three to four products the suite covers itself.
All of that should happen automatically without getting stuck in a subpar tier for year, or being unable to downsize when you stop using a product.
Typekit used to cost around £50/year - and allowed agencies to use webfonts on their client sites. Now the clients have to spend £26.50 / month on a product they don't actually need in order to get a font on their website...
From an intuition standpoint, I would NOT expect my license of web fonts to extend to a client I’m selling my work to. My null hypothesis would be that there is an additional license to acquire.
https://www.npr.org/2019/03/25/706715377/man-pleads-guilty-t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...
Or do people really look at a font that might cost thousands of USD to use, like Proxima Nova (https://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/proxima-nova) and go: "Yes, this is exactly what fits my creative vision and nothing less will do!"
Not that it wouldn't be worth the price tag for some, but to me that feels like something that only large enterprises for which that's a rounding error might want to do.
In my opinion, anything longer than a slogan will probably benefit from the tried-and-tested nature of pedestrian typefaces, and is not the right place for excessive design flair. Nonetheless, it is not trivial to install and manage fonts, nor to understand the licensing obligations of free fonts.
the free ones that come close, like the dejavu font family, are very few and overused.
https://youtu.be/jVhlJNJopOQ?si=GYj6XGNv2AMAZqCg
But, the reality is 99.9999% of websites can use one of the free Google fonts. The other .0001% could too, but they want to show that they are not like all the other websites.
So, yes, people would notice if most brands started "feeling" the same.
I do not believe this for a second. Has there been any serious research done on this?
Typography is visual design after all, and is not any different from other design elements we see all around us. It's obvious that it has an impact in how we perceive and experience brands, and the source of any text we read.
[1]: https://www.monotype.com/company/news/monotype-study-shows-t...
A sibling comment pointed out font psychology, which you might want to look into. Most of this is rooted in visual design, which is an inexact science, so you probably won't find the type of studies you want to see, for the same reason you won't find studies about other art forms.
Sure, I can see the subtle differences, but one costs $1650 for all styles, the other one is free. Most of the letters seem to be only stretched vertically by a few percent, with no other visible differences. If I had a job to create a new font, I wouldn't have the guts turning this in as my original work.
I am sure that 95% of podiatrists honestly believe that's good and important advice. Just as 95% of font designers honestly think that subtle differences in kerning are strongly impactful.
Considering the large numbers of diabetics or pre-diabetics in the USA this isn’t actually a stretch.
Of course, if a document comes with one of them, I certainly wouldn't be able to tell you which one it is. But they are certainly not the same.
[0] https://github.com/dw5/metropolis
It's more like: you are sitting in a room with the c suite, and the design firm they hired to refresh the brand. The design firm sells the c suite on "this font exemplifies who you are and you you want to represent yourself to the world as." Then you chime in and say it looks like every other font and there are legal licensing issues, and the c suite tells you that you are chicken little and the design firm knows what they are doing and will take care of it. They are the experts not you. Why are you even in this meeting?
The last time I worked somewhere that brought in outsiders to refresh the brand, the font they ended up standardizing on was .... Proxima Nova.
tell you they want it installed on all desktop computers and all word templates changed to use it, ignoring mobile only people, and the fact that your brand standards will appear for the purchasing department but not anybody outside the company you send the documents to,
need to be talked out of using it in email signatures, and that the only safe option is Arial. Which they could have just picked for everything in the first place,
ignore the brand standards themselves because conforming to them takes too much time and attention paying.
Pretty soon they will forget they even standardized the company on a font, but the mess will still linger.
This is part of the business problem that the Adobe CC subscription solves. I you already have a subscription, which is relatively inexpensive and bundled with Adobe software licenses, then the marginal cost of using a particular font in their library is zero.
That said, I've also had a role on the client side and, yes, we spent quite a lot of time discussing which of the font options presented by our designer we preferred and would have happily spent a thousand or two dollars on the one we liked best. Although it seems like a lot for a font, it would have been a very small part of the total budget for the project.
As it happened, though, we were simply presented with a total budget for the project, without a line item for font licensing. Either our designer has some sort of CC-style library license, or it was just rolled into the bundled price. In theory, then, maybe the designers have an incentive to use cheaper fonts in situations like this. But it's probably the designers on their team that most want to use the pricey fonts.
> Does my client need their own font license to use the designs? No, not if you are creating graphics or documents that have rasterized or properly embedded font data, such as a PDF, JPEG, or PNG.
> However, if your client needs to have the font installed to edit your design, they will need their own license, either through a Creative Cloud subscription or as a desktop license purchase.
But for websites, the answer seems considerably more complicated but, essentially, 'no.'
> Can I use web fonts for my client websites? The Terms of Use do not permit reselling beyond December 31, 2019. After that time, the client's website must load Adobe Fonts from their own Creative Cloud subscription to ensure that there isn't any interruption to the font licensing or web font hosting. > Please refer to the full Terms of Use for more information on what reselling the service means, and related definitions. . . . [A few more paragraphs about how to switch things over from your CC account to a client's.]
https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html
Reading between the lines there just a little bit, it seems like Adobe may have run into its own licensing issues. And this all depends on Adobe being correct that they have gotten a license from the creator of the font that allows Adobe, in turn, to convey these rights to the CC subscriber. Uncertainty on exactly these points--Does Adobe allow clients to use the fonts without their own subscription? Does Adobe itself have the rights to allow this?--seems like the root of the issue in the article:
>The one useful Adobe representative we spoke to on the phone last week mentioned that numerous people are having trouble with the Adobe licencing with this particular font. She said that Adobe may not have the appropriate licencing for this font listed on the website – unsure if this is reliable information or not, but thought I’d mention, as if this is the case, there should be more information clearly visible on the font’s webpage about how to use it correctly.
>From our understanding, we have used the font in the correct way (according to the Adobe Web Project method). However, our client does not have an Adobe subscription, so we concerned that we are not covered by the Adobe licence due to this: https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html.
The first support person to answer the phone should have been able to deliver this url https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html#web-... and told them that their client needs to buy a creative suite license to solve the problem.
I get that OP didn't manage to find the answer to their question in the FAQ, but tier 1 support basically exists to direct people to the FAQ answer they are looking for. Instead Adobe paid for at least 13 support calls of labor. Which from the employee standpoint seems to suggest that head count can be justified just by providing a worse service.
Nobody likes to hear it, but I think there is an opportunity for blockchain here.
Like any piece of software, fonts are licensed for specific uses. The kind of license you need is determined by how you will be using the fonts and what you will be using them to create. [...]
A web license lets you serve the fonts on a website and use them as live, dynamic text via HTML and @font-face CSS. The cost is determined by the specific fonts licensed, the approximate number of monthly page views the websites using the fonts receive, and the length of the license in years.
https://www.marksimonson.com/info/purchasing
So - if this font was being used in just a few places, they could easily convert that text to images and be fully compliant (though obviously hacky). However, since they're loading it as a web font, now they have to pay.
It gets weirder when you talk about productivity software - lots of companies believe that they "own" their fonts, and hence can use them in their documents with impunity. In reality, they likely have an unlimited organization usage license, which allows them to install the font files on every computer in the organization, but not to distribute them outside of their organization. Have a design agency that you hire to build slide decks for the sales team? They need to buy a license to use that font (or you buy it for them).
This also creates a reason to distribute documents in rendered form - wonder why that marketing deck got emailed to you from a vendor as a PDF instead of the PPT? If it uses a licensed font, you probably don't have a license and consequently won't have the font file installed on your computer, which causes the document to fall back to an alternate font (with mixed results)
This is often true even when the font was custom-designed for a particular company - if it's a custom version of an existing font, the foundry typically creates a one off license for that customer.
This is also why Google Docs and Slides can't support custom fonts - in their model, the fonts are delivered over the browser, so there's no way to limit distribution of documents with those fonts to remain in compliance with the foundry licensing. (Disclosure: I'm a googler, I worked on google slides years ago, got a ton of requests for custom fonts, out of 30+ companies that asked for this, only two owned their fonts in such a way that they could actually be distributed without limits).
We are posting our message that we shared on the Adobe forum here, too, to ensure anyone with questions or concerns can see it.
We wanted to take this opportunity to offer our thoughts here. The Type Founders (or TTF) launched in 2021 and our mission is to develop an extensive library of high-quality, distinctive, and usable typefaces. We are a small team of individuals who love all things typographic and have dedicated our careers to advancing the interests of type designers and all users of type. Underneath the TTF umbrella are 27 type foundry brands and a library of 7,000+ fonts, many of which are available on Adobe Fonts. The vast majority of type designers behind these foundries remain actively involved, drawing and publishing new fonts. As custodians of these legacies and the craft, it is our business to work with those designers to help their typefaces flourish. One aspect of that is ensuring that their work is properly licensed.
The discipline of type design is uniquely positioned at the intersection of art, history, culture, and engineering. As new technologies and content platforms take hold — such as dynamic websites, mobile apps, and streaming platforms — font software and licensing have evolved from the days of buying a case of wood type to receiving a CD with a couple hundred fonts to downloading files onto your computer or accessing them directly from the cloud. This inevitably leads to some confusion about what is and is not covered by certain licenses, especially as no common license exists in our industry — a topic we spend a great deal talking about at font conferences (yes, those are actually a thing!). With Adobe Fonts, Adobe has built an amazing service for Creative Cloud subscribers, and we are lucky to be one of their partners. The Adobe Fonts library has thousands of great typefaces for any project and the service is easy to use and seamlessly integrates into Adobe apps. The font license included is straightforward, but there are a few nuances, which likely explains the confusion and frustration on this thread and why our representatives may have reached out to you to verify licensing for one of our fonts. After this letter, we will address those points specifically.
Developing well-crafted typefaces requires years of training — including specialized design and technical skills — and often involves collaboration with other designers and engineers. We understand that receiving an email telling you that you are in the wrong or asking you to purchase a license for something you thought you already owned may be frustrating but unfortunately type designers are not fairly compensated for their work if their fonts are not properly licensed, including how fonts on Adobe Fonts are used.
As mentioned above, the TTF team cares deeply about type design and typography and are here to answer any questions you might have about Adobe Fonts, font licensing in general, or anything at all related to type. Don’t hesitate to reach out at any time: info@thetypefounders.com.
Thank you from the TTF team! — Aaron, Bram, Dan, Ivan, Jill, Marina, Paley, Richard, Sam, and Tiffany
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To address some of the questions raised on the Adobe thread, any font on Adobe Fonts can be used for personal and commercial projects, with a few exceptions, as outlined in Adobe’s font licensing FAQ (https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html). This includes using the fonts on websites as long as you follow Adobe’s instructions (https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/add-fonts-website.html). In practical terms, for web use via Adobe Fonts, this means:
1. You need to use the Adobe Fonts web font hosting service (or CDN) to serve the fonts to your website. 2. If y...