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Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

arun.is

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Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#201

Post by fsloth »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #98
fsloth wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a hunch. I may be wrong. It seems to me that a font, suitable for printing, is a niche product with a very old history of proprietary providers and craftsmen. It's this crafts aspect which makes the open sourcing a bit more difficult, IMO. I.e you need specialists to maintain a certain quality.

And only rent-seeking craftsmen are capable of high quality work?

The question is not quality, but predictability.

Mickey Mouse is not a very good analog to a typeface. The analog to Mickey Mouse would be a letter in an alphabet - an abstract concept, that, never the less, is immediately recognizable.

A typeface, then, is a specific set of instructions to a specific implementation of this abstract idea. I.e. with Mickey it might be a specification to a specific implementation of this character including the type of voice actor to use, how the character behaves specifically, how it moves, etc etc. I.e. a much more specific than just "It's mickey, it's ours, fuck off" type of obstruction of creativity.

Like I said, I have no idea if foundries and their license fees are necessary, but at least their clients know how to source a specific high quality implementation of their typefaces.

Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#202

Post by amyjess »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #17
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #5

>I can’t help but feel that some of these companies wanted a >custom typeface simply because that’s what everyone else is >doing. This cargo cult mentality that is so prevalent in >design is at best wasteful and at worst illegal. Illegal?!? I'm going to need to see some work on this part. I couldn't find anything in the article that seemed to directly support the assertion. on edit: formatting

Yeah, the author needs to either remove that or clarify that point. That being said, I think the author means that all of these new type faces are very similar and so they may be infringing. Or that the companies want a familiar type face but don't want to pay for it, so they commission a look-a-like. But, that's just a very large grasp on my part from reading the article.

It may be different in other countries, but in the US font design cannot be copyrighted. The TTF/OTF files can, and so can the hinting algorithms, but the actual design of the font is legally guaranteed to be copyrightable by anyone.

Why? Because a long time ago, the US government was worried that somebody would exploit a loophole and try to copyright the alphabet. So they set up protections to absolutely make sure nobody can do this.

Interestingly, this means that text-only logos like the Coca-Cola logo can't be copyrighted; they're only protected by trademark.

Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#203

Post by erikpukinskis »

freehunter wrote: post #149
ken wrote: post #119

You can tell how old a car is by the extra words on the back under the name. "Fuel injected"? 1980's or 1990's. "Hybrid"? 2000's or 2010's. Similarly, you can tell the era of computer software by what strange thing they decide they need to customize. We're in the era of "slight variants of Helvetica". (Nobody's asking for a Zapfino clone, strangely.) For whatever reason, fonts and logotypes are the axis on which ever…

Personally I think the problem is the over-use of analytics in page design. No one can compete on page design anymore because it doesn't convert well with focus groups or in A/B testing, so every page looks like a Bootstrap template. So they try to find SOMETHING that won't put up lower conversion numbers yet is slightly different so they can say their page is unique.

Custom fonts are generally bad for conversion too.

Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#204

Post by KwanEsq »

ardy42 wrote: post #198
KwanEsq wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately web fonts can be easily disabled in Firefox with the gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled pref in about:config.

> Fortunately web fonts can be easily disabled in Firefox with the gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled pref in about:config. I've tried that, but unfortunately it breaks websites that use custom fonts for interface icons.

In that case I've recently discovered that the setting that disallows websites to choose their own fonts, browser.display.use_document_fonts = 0 , available in the advanced fonts dialog in the user-facing settings, seems to thread a middle ground of generally blocking web fonts, but still allowing icon fonts (perhaps due to icons fonts being Private Use Area codepoints that won't have local fonts?).
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