How would you feel if your designs were being copied or given away?

If you are ever tempted to use an unlicensed font, spare a thought for your professional colleagues, the typeface designers...

Like all design disciplines, typeface design is a highly skilled profession.

Typeface designers need to consider the look of the typeface as a whole, as well as the sum of its individual characters. They have to consider the message it needs to convey, and the medium in which it is to be used. Typeface designers examine the shape of each letter and symbol; consider the key usage elements, such as the space around each character, and how the letters connect with each other for readability; the width of strokes that form the letter and how those change for different weights and styles.

It’s not surprising that creating just one new typeface can take many years of effort and requires very specific skills and expertise in both design and technology. For instance, Sebastian Lester devoted 3,000 hours over 3 years to develop the Soho Gothic™ typeface. All 40 fonts, 32,668 characters of it.

Designers from all disciplines recognise the importance of a typeface in getting a written message across. Typefaces are probably the most influential yet subtle instruments in visual communication. Different typefaces lend themselves to different media, different tones of voice and expression. The unquenchable thirst for new type designs and custom type designs, and the availability of more than 100,000 commercial fonts reflects this.

Yet once a typeface is produced in its digital format, as a font, it is often treated differently to other pieces of design. It is not unusual for fonts to travel with jobs; to be passed around freely; to be offered free on the internet. Ask yourself, how would you feel if your designs were being copied or given away?

Why does this happen to fonts?
Is it because they are relatively inexpensive? Is it because fonts are so ubiquitous? Is it because passing fonts around has become ‘common practice’? Is it because fonts aren’t recognised as licensed software? Is it because fonts are not perceived as highly technical and complex pieces of design? Whatever the reason, the consequences are far reaching.

Why do fonts need to be licensed?
When purchasing a font, you are actually purchasing a licence for the perpetual use of that font. This helps pay for all the creative and production expenses needed to design, develop, test, market and distribute the font. All of which are steps essential to bringing a font to market.

Taking this to the extreme, if everyone used unlicensed fonts, this process would grind to a halt, new designs would not be brought to market and type designers would never be recompensed for their work. But furthermore the supply of new professional, highly quality fonts would dry up, having an impact on every branch of design communicating the written message. This is why it’s important to support your fellow professional designers by using legitimate, licensed font software.

Read more about font licensing »

Of course there are many web sites offering thousands of free fonts. Many of these are legitimate sites and often offer fonts with a licence for personal use only. However, rarely are these fonts licensed for commercial use. Furthermore, fonts sourced from these sites may not have under gone the same rigourous testing as a commercial font. Can you imagine using a free font in a job, only to have it fall over at the eleventh hour as your deadline looms? In addition there are unscrupulous sites and sources that offer commercial fonts for free, thus depriving the typeface designer of their rightful income.

Who designs type? Meet some of the talented typeface designers from the Monotype Studio.

Sebastian Lester is passionate about letterform, blaming Neville Brody for his obsession with all things type and typographic. He stumbled across ‘The Graphic Language of Neville Brody’ whilst at college, and has never looked back. After graduating in Graphic Design from Central Saint Martins in London, Sebastian worked as a graphic designer in the music and games industries, helping develop a Rolling Stones Tour book and creating animated typography for Genesis.

Sebastian’s work has been featured in Creative Review, Grafik, Computer Arts and numerous other publications worldwide. He has also been interviewed by the BBC and The Independent Newspaper about fonts on movie posters and album covers respectively.

He is now a senior type designer at Monotype Imaging and he has developed custom typefaces for Barclays, The Daily Telegraph, Waitrose, British Airways and many other companies, publications and institutions worldwide. He has designed several highly successful retail typefaces for the Monotype Library including the Scene, Neo Sans and Soho typefaces.

Alice Savoie is a talented young type designer, already an award winner. Her love for type was sparked during her college years when she was inspired by teachers passionate about type.

Alice achieved an MA with distinction in typeface design at Reading University in 2007, and, in the same year, won the award for the best Greek text typeface during the International Conference on Typography and Visual Communication in Thessaloniki, Greece. Alice worked in graphic design practices in Prague and London, but her enthusiasm for type led her to Monotype Imaging, joining as a typeface designer in 2008. Her current work consists mainly of custom type designs, as well as new additions to the Monotype Library. She has also developed various non-latin scripts such as Greek, Cyrillic and Thai. Of the non-Latin scripts, Alice particularly enjoys drawing Greek.

Her projects have included the development of new weights and OpenType Pro character sets for the Felbridge typeface, a sans-serif typeface family initially designed by Robin Nicholas; she has also designed a condensed version of the Felbridge typeface, as well as a Greek and a Cyrillic, intended to be used on mobile devices. In 2008, she worked with Patrick Giasson to extend the range of weights of the Times headline typefaces. Recent work includes developing headline fonts for Ysobel, a new series of Monotype typefaces intended for newspaper use.

Award winning Patrick Giasson trained and worked as a Graphic Designer in Montreal, Canada. In 2000 he relocated to London to join a leading branding agency, Wollf Olins, as resident Type Designer, working on logotypes and bespoke typefaces for high profile clients such as General Electric, Abbey National and the Tate galleries.

Patrick then achieved an MA (Hons) in Typeface Design from the University of Reading, where he focused on non-Latin type design before joining Monotype Imaging in 2004. Patrick has contributed to the development and expansion of typographic families for the Monotype library. He has created bespoke typefaces in the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Arabic scripts for a variety of clients such as Ikea, The Times and the Al Ittihad.

Patrick says “The design of typefaces for text application (which is the core of my practice) poses a paradoxical challenge in that we must strike a balance between giving as much personality and uniqueness as possibly to a new font while aiming to depart as little as possible form established canons of legibility.

“Designing a typeface involves a considerable amount of work. The drawing of the characters is the most visible part of the process, but other considerations such as spacing and kerning must be addressed. With the development of recent technological developments such as OpenType (OT), a significant of work also involves the coding of OT features into the font file.

“Ironically, the more time is spent crafting and refining a text typeface to optimise its performance, the more invisible it will become, but that is the ultimate goal; to serve the reader.”

Patrick has received international acclaim, with awards for his graphic and typographic work from D&AD, the New York Art Directors Club, the New York Type Directors Club, the Tokyo Type Directors Club, the AIGA 100 Show and I.D. Magazine.