5 ms·

Font Smuggler – Copy hidden brand fonts into Google Docs

178 points by lanewinfield 7mo ago

dijit 7mo ago
Whoa. How does this work? One of the major issues we had at my previous company weaning people off of powerpoint (to google docs) was brand fonts. Ours, of course. A lot of what is considered brand identity in presentations comes from fonts, which makes Google Docs Slides a non-starter for many unfortunately. (we ended up making them in powerpoint and using the Google Docs compatibility mode with pptx).
- rafram 7mo ago
 > Google Workspace lets brands who pay enough embed custom corporate fonts into their docs and slides. Normally, these are locked to just those brands shelling out for custom typefaces, but there's one loophole: the ol' copy/paste.
- mhitza 7mo ago
 From the small info icon that opens up a section. > Google Workspace lets brands who pay enough embed custom corporate fonts into their docs and slides. Normally, these are locked to just those brands shelling out for custom typefaces, but there's one loophole: the ol' copy/paste. Below are a selection of brand fonts with which you can do exactly that. Enjoy.
 - dijit 7mo ago
 Oh thanks! I looked but I missed that. So, I need to be super rich? Thats sad.
 - vrganj 7mo ago
 Why did we go from owning the software we run and being able to just modify things as we see fit to "You have to give Google a lot of money so you can have your own font in your own presentation"? Where did things go this wrong?
 - Someone 7mo ago
 If you want to drink your own wine in a restaurant, you have to pay for that, too. This isn’t much different; there still are plenty of non-Google options for creating presentations to choose from that do allow using your own font.
 Dylan16807 7mo ago
 If SaaS is a restaurant, what's software I purchase? A personal robot chef with an infinite ingredient supply, no charge for using my own wine? I think that supports the "Where did things go this wrong?" sentiment.
 ryandrake 7mo ago
 The analogies with physical businesses never make sense. Running an application on your own computer is nothing like eating at a restaurant. Just because the software is obtained from a server somewhere doesn't mean it's like going to a physical place to eat. Browsing to www.company.com is not akin to walking into a company's physical store. You're not "there." There is no "there."
 shiroiuma 7mo ago
 >If you want to drink your own wine in a restaurant, you have to pay for that, too. Depends on the place. Tons of restaurants in New Jersey encourage you to bring your own wine bottle and don't charge a "corking fee".
 - Andrex 7mo ago
 I'm going to go the unpopular route and ask, how mission-critical are fonts, really? Protected fonts such as these can't be mission-critical, legally, right? Never felt myself lacking for fonts in Docs, myself. Quite the opposite, Google Fonts has way more than I'd ever have preinstalled and is now my primary avenue for typeface discovery.
 vrganj 7mo ago
 - crazygringo 7mo ago
 No, you need to be at least a medium-sized corporation basically. Then because your contract with Google is large enough to matter, they'll add your custom corporate branded fonts to your font dropdowns.
 - Freak_NL 7mo ago
 Basically the level where you've progressed from user to customer.
- Mattwmaster58 7mo ago
 copy/paste doesn't tell you much - here's the text/html content they put on your clipboard if you're curious. Apparently GDocs supports this out of the box, just hides it from the selection box. Which makes sense given that it doesn't support any font. <html> <body> <meta charset='utf-8'><meta charset="utf-8"><span style="font-size:22pt;font-family:'Facebook Sans',sans-serif;color:#000000;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;white-space:pre-wrap;">I just stole Facebook Sans  </body> </html>
love2read 7mo ago
I really like the style of copying the “google tool” style that this website and jmail use. It makes the project feel different compared to all the ai-generated app these days.
novov 7mo ago
Is there any difference between Source Serif and Source Sans as listed here and the publicly available versions, given they are open source typefaces?
ngrilly 7mo ago
Would be really good if Google Docs could support custom brand fonts by letting their customers upload them in the admin console.
varun_ch 7mo ago
I knew about this for Google’s own fonts but had no idea they offered the option to use custom fonts. Is there any easy place to find a list of them? I wonder if the custom fonts are just hardcoded/pushed to their CDN alongside all the other ones.
WillAdams 7mo ago
Surprised that such font access isn't gated by IP address --- usually font licenses are quite restrictive and have such requirements for usage.
- jonpalmisc 7mo ago
  The licenses (from major foundries/vendors) are indeed usually quite restrictive; however, the hard part has always been enforcing them. It's not surprising to me that Google hasn't built any guardrails around this. After all, gating by IP address? What happens if someone from the marketing team logs on from an airport? All of the slides revert to Arial?
  - WillAdams 7mo ago
    The access would presumably need to be done through a VPN to have the fonts.
    - qingcharles 7mo ago
      Ehh.. a lot of these docs go out to customers and end users. Playboy for instance sends out tons of their updates and plans to clients with their own custom fonts in it.
      - WillAdams 7mo ago
        That's what PDFs are for --- the font files can be embedded in a fashion which precludes downloading/usage. Various print shops have systems in place for previewing/approving print jobs as well.
- Cockbrand 7mo ago
  This is an architectural problem. These companies share their documents with externals, and the documents must behave normally to these externals. So it doesn't just have to look as intended, the external person also needs to be able to edit the documents with the CI fonts available. One could imagine that access to the fonts could be restricted to the logged-in user, but that would mean that public documents that can be accessed without a login wouldn't have the specific fonts.
ILoveHorses 7mo ago
Any idea how did the creator manage to get access to the fonts in the first place? Won't you need a Google Docs document which uses the given font and then copy it from there and put it up on the website? Or is there some way the creator could have put these fonts on his website from publicly available information?
- yorwba 7mo ago
 It's just setting the font-family in the style attribute of a . (As you can see by inspecting the text/html content of your clipboard, e.g. with `xclip -selection clipboard -o -t text/html`)
- bogdan 7mo ago
 Have a look at the raw clipboard data with something like https://evercoder.github.io/clipboard-inspector/ https://evercoder.github.io/clipboard-inspector/ and you'll see how it's all set up. A bunch of markup that can be obtained from any google doc with the font name updated.
- lanewinfield 7mo ago
 hi, creator of the site here. A LONG time ago, I was shared on a document with a brand font and was surprised to see it was a custom one. With a bit of testing, I realized I could pull it into a new document and that new document would then become "infested" with that font and allow me to use it anywhere else within. I recently realized there must be even more fonts that exist that I don't know of, so (transparently, with the help of Claude,) I ran through a list of potential clients (some listed on Google Workspace's site, some I just assumed) and tested across many. This is the list I came back with.
jmathai 7mo ago
Received DMCA takedown notices for a paid font I used for my wife’s interior design website that she liked but we didn’t pay for because…I’m lazy. I was surprised to receive the DMCA (it is hosted on GitHub Pages). I ignored the emails because…I’m lazy. They (GitHub) eventually took down the repository (and site). So I swapped to another font and I don’t think my wife noticed. I think all of this was still easier than probably paying for the font! Lesson of the story? Don’t underestimate the impact of laziness on your potential customers.
- detritus 7mo ago
  Out of interest, did you rename the font prior to use? I'm curious how they found it. You can also just stick them in a font-editor and re-export "as your own font" with some minor tweaks. Not that you should, of course.
  - iamcalledrob 7mo ago
    You really should pay, especially for work by small foundries. Making a typeface takes a tremendous amount of work. The financial upside is extremely hard to justify. I think non-designers underestimate the amount of effort required by an order of magnitude. I put it in the territory of building indie games. Potentially years of your life go into it, and it's a huge problem if everyone pirates your work.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 7mo ago
      >You really should pay, especially for work by small foundries. You can't copyright the alphabet. >and it's a huge problem if everyone pirates your work. I've never pirated a font. Not once have I boarded a ship in the middle of the ocean, gun in hand, taking the crew and cargo of typography hostage. But more seriously, I acknowledge that it's a problem. It's just not my problem.
      - dhosek 7mo ago
        Legally, typeface designs do not receive protection (which is based on idiotic declarations like “you can’t copyright the alphabet”) but digital font files are considered programs and thus are able to be protected as IP.¹ You can try to justify the theft to yourself but somewhere there’s an individual (or on some occasions many individuals) who spent a long time making decisions about how that typeface should look and choosing the best points to turn it into splines to describe the shape and you decided that your laziness trumps their work. ⸻ 1. I would note that bitmap fonts do not receive the same protection as Type 1 or OTF fonts.
virtualritz 7mo ago
I love how all these 'brand' fonts look indistinguishable to an untrained eye and still brain-frying-bordedom-inducingly close to each other to someone like me who actually studied & worked in typography. Related: https://eidosdesign.substack.com/p/why-every-brand-looks-the-same-and https://eidosdesign.substack.com/p/why-every-brand-looks-the...
- bensyverson 7mo ago
  It's just the design team running in place. And at a certain scale, it's cheaper to pay a type foundry $100k once, rather than paying Monotype continuous fees for a legacy family. But as someone who has made multiple neutral sans families, I agree. The launch rhetoric about creating a differentiated visual identity is comical when you look at all the interchangeable corporate sans together.
- dkuntz2 7mo ago
  that's because a ton of them are just off the shelf fonts they had someone make minor changes to
- bonoboTP 7mo ago
  Pretty sure it's just the pendulum swinging. Today its all about serious and clean and minimal. Then it will be whimsical and maximalist again. Skinny jeans, baggy jeans. Skeumorphic, flat.
- gguncth 7mo ago
  The purpose of the brand font is to avoid paying licensing fees. Because the typefaces aren’t protected by copyright it’s usually enough to just have someone go and essentially clone an existing font. The whole thing is an artifact of peculiarities of IP law
  - breakingcups 7mo ago
    Is that true, though? Wouldn't it be possible to just copy a font wholesale, since they are uncopyrightable? How would licensing fees be enforced?
huflungdung 7mo ago
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tavavex 7mo ago
I didn't know that many brands had their own bespoke fonts. Especially the less prominent players like Colgate or Korean Air. Was this caused by normal font licensing being so restrictive or expensive that they just decided to hire someone to make a font just for them, or design teams insisting that this sans serif that looks almost like all the others (but not quite) is essential to their design?
- russdill 7mo ago
  For most of these fonts, I feel fairly certain if someone gave me a sample I could identify the brand.
  - mrweasel 7mo ago
    Remove the name from the font and I'm fairly certain that I'd get none of them, well maybe HP. E.g. the Klarna Headline is pretty distinct, but I've never seen it before. The four other Klarna fonts are super generic. Also why do they need five different fonts? Mostly I think these custom fonts are a waste of money. If you ship software that needs to include fonts, and you don't want to pay a license, it makes sense. If you do it because of "corporate identity" it seems pointless.
    - russdill 7mo ago
      Different people work differently I suppose. It's true that some of the fonts seem designed to be forgettable, such as Source, Product, Optimistic. But others are, like Netflix, Verizon, Korean Air, HP, and Colgate look heavily branded to me.
- pixl97 7mo ago
  >like Colgate It's still an 80 billion dollar company in market cap, so there is that. Also I'm guessing it's so they have another means of attack on knock off products that directly copy them.
- wpm 7mo ago
  I have respect for the design teams that at least just drop the bullshit and say "Yeah Inter is our font, whatever, who cares"
numbers 7mo ago
because they're brand fonts, none of them feel great to write more than a headline with
youniverse 7mo ago
I was just looking into the custom anthropic sans and serif fonts used for the claude app, I really like those!
Dwedit 7mo ago
The word YouTube really depends a lot on good kerning. The "YouTube Display" font has much better kerning around the uppercase T than the other three fonts that mention YouTube.
tempaccountabgd 7mo ago
[dead]

178 points by lanewinfield 7mo ago

dijit 7mo ago

Whoa. How does this work? One of the major issues we had at my previous company weaning people off of powerpoint (to google docs) was brand fonts. Ours, of course. A lot of what is considered brand identity in presentations comes from fonts, which makes Google Docs Slides a non-starter for many unfortunately. (we ended up making them in powerpoint and using the Google Docs compatibility mode with pptx).

rafram 7mo ago
> Google Workspace lets brands who pay enough embed custom corporate fonts into their docs and slides. Normally, these are locked to just those brands shelling out for custom typefaces, but there's one loophole: the ol' copy/paste.
mhitza 7mo ago
From the small info icon that opens up a section. > Google Workspace lets brands who pay enough embed custom corporate fonts into their docs and slides. Normally, these are locked to just those brands shelling out for custom typefaces, but there's one loophole: the ol' copy/paste. Below are a selection of brand fonts with which you can do exactly that. Enjoy.
- dijit 7mo ago
  Oh thanks! I looked but I missed that. So, I need to be super rich? Thats sad.
  - vrganj 7mo ago
    Why did we go from owning the software we run and being able to just modify things as we see fit to "You have to give Google a lot of money so you can have your own font in your own presentation"? Where did things go this wrong?
    - Someone 7mo ago
      If you want to drink your own wine in a restaurant, you have to pay for that, too. This isn’t much different; there still are plenty of non-Google options for creating presentations to choose from that do allow using your own font.
      - Dylan16807 7mo ago
        If SaaS is a restaurant, what's software I purchase? A personal robot chef with an infinite ingredient supply, no charge for using my own wine? I think that supports the "Where did things go this wrong?" sentiment.
        ryandrake 7mo ago
        The analogies with physical businesses never make sense. Running an application on your own computer is nothing like eating at a restaurant. Just because the software is obtained from a server somewhere doesn't mean it's like going to a physical place to eat. Browsing to www.company.com is not akin to walking into a company's physical store. You're not "there." There is no "there."
      - shiroiuma 7mo ago
        >If you want to drink your own wine in a restaurant, you have to pay for that, too. Depends on the place. Tons of restaurants in New Jersey encourage you to bring your own wine bottle and don't charge a "corking fee".
    - Andrex 7mo ago
      I'm going to go the unpopular route and ask, how mission-critical are fonts, really? Protected fonts such as these can't be mission-critical, legally, right? Never felt myself lacking for fonts in Docs, myself. Quite the opposite, Google Fonts has way more than I'd ever have preinstalled and is now my primary avenue for typeface discovery.
      - vrganj 7mo ago
  - crazygringo 7mo ago
    No, you need to be at least a medium-sized corporation basically. Then because your contract with Google is large enough to matter, they'll add your custom corporate branded fonts to your font dropdowns.
    - Freak_NL 7mo ago
      Basically the level where you've progressed from user to customer.
Mattwmaster58 7mo ago
copy/paste doesn't tell you much - here's the text/html content they put on your clipboard if you're curious. Apparently GDocs supports this out of the box, just hides it from the selection box. Which makes sense given that it doesn't support any font. <html> <body> <meta charset='utf-8'><meta charset="utf-8"><span style="font-size:22pt;font-family:'Facebook Sans',sans-serif;color:#000000;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;white-space:pre-wrap;">I just stole Facebook Sans  </body> </html>

love2read 7mo ago

I really like the style of copying the “google tool” style that this website and jmail use. It makes the project feel different compared to all the ai-generated app these days.

novov 7mo ago

Is there any difference between Source Serif and Source Sans as listed here and the publicly available versions, given they are open source typefaces?

ngrilly 7mo ago

Would be really good if Google Docs could support custom brand fonts by letting their customers upload them in the admin console.

varun_ch 7mo ago

I knew about this for Google’s own fonts but had no idea they offered the option to use custom fonts. Is there any easy place to find a list of them? I wonder if the custom fonts are just hardcoded/pushed to their CDN alongside all the other ones.

WillAdams 7mo ago

Surprised that such font access isn't gated by IP address --- usually font licenses are quite restrictive and have such requirements for usage.

jonpalmisc 7mo ago
The licenses (from major foundries/vendors) are indeed usually quite restrictive; however, the hard part has always been enforcing them. It's not surprising to me that Google hasn't built any guardrails around this. After all, gating by IP address? What happens if someone from the marketing team logs on from an airport? All of the slides revert to Arial?
- WillAdams 7mo ago
  The access would presumably need to be done through a VPN to have the fonts.
  - qingcharles 7mo ago
    Ehh.. a lot of these docs go out to customers and end users. Playboy for instance sends out tons of their updates and plans to clients with their own custom fonts in it.
    - WillAdams 7mo ago
      That's what PDFs are for --- the font files can be embedded in a fashion which precludes downloading/usage. Various print shops have systems in place for previewing/approving print jobs as well.
Cockbrand 7mo ago
This is an architectural problem. These companies share their documents with externals, and the documents must behave normally to these externals. So it doesn't just have to look as intended, the external person also needs to be able to edit the documents with the CI fonts available. One could imagine that access to the fonts could be restricted to the logged-in user, but that would mean that public documents that can be accessed without a login wouldn't have the specific fonts.

ILoveHorses 7mo ago

Any idea how did the creator manage to get access to the fonts in the first place? Won't you need a Google Docs document which uses the given font and then copy it from there and put it up on the website? Or is there some way the creator could have put these fonts on his website from publicly available information?

yorwba 7mo ago
It's just setting the font-family in the style attribute of a . (As you can see by inspecting the text/html content of your clipboard, e.g. with `xclip -selection clipboard -o -t text/html`)
bogdan 7mo ago
Have a look at the raw clipboard data with something like https://evercoder.github.io/clipboard-inspector/ https://evercoder.github.io/clipboard-inspector/ and you'll see how it's all set up. A bunch of markup that can be obtained from any google doc with the font name updated.
lanewinfield 7mo ago
hi, creator of the site here. A LONG time ago, I was shared on a document with a brand font and was surprised to see it was a custom one. With a bit of testing, I realized I could pull it into a new document and that new document would then become "infested" with that font and allow me to use it anywhere else within. I recently realized there must be even more fonts that exist that I don't know of, so (transparently, with the help of Claude,) I ran through a list of potential clients (some listed on Google Workspace's site, some I just assumed) and tested across many. This is the list I came back with.

jmathai 7mo ago

Received DMCA takedown notices for a paid font I used for my wife’s interior design website that she liked but we didn’t pay for because…I’m lazy. I was surprised to receive the DMCA (it is hosted on GitHub Pages). I ignored the emails because…I’m lazy. They (GitHub) eventually took down the repository (and site). So I swapped to another font and I don’t think my wife noticed. I think all of this was still easier than probably paying for the font! Lesson of the story? Don’t underestimate the impact of laziness on your potential customers.

detritus 7mo ago
Out of interest, did you rename the font prior to use? I'm curious how they found it. You can also just stick them in a font-editor and re-export "as your own font" with some minor tweaks. Not that you should, of course.
- iamcalledrob 7mo ago
  You really should pay, especially for work by small foundries. Making a typeface takes a tremendous amount of work. The financial upside is extremely hard to justify. I think non-designers underestimate the amount of effort required by an order of magnitude. I put it in the territory of building indie games. Potentially years of your life go into it, and it's a huge problem if everyone pirates your work.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 7mo ago
    >You really should pay, especially for work by small foundries. You can't copyright the alphabet. >and it's a huge problem if everyone pirates your work. I've never pirated a font. Not once have I boarded a ship in the middle of the ocean, gun in hand, taking the crew and cargo of typography hostage. But more seriously, I acknowledge that it's a problem. It's just not my problem.
    - dhosek 7mo ago
      Legally, typeface designs do not receive protection (which is based on idiotic declarations like “you can’t copyright the alphabet”) but digital font files are considered programs and thus are able to be protected as IP.¹ You can try to justify the theft to yourself but somewhere there’s an individual (or on some occasions many individuals) who spent a long time making decisions about how that typeface should look and choosing the best points to turn it into splines to describe the shape and you decided that your laziness trumps their work. ⸻ 1. I would note that bitmap fonts do not receive the same protection as Type 1 or OTF fonts.

virtualritz 7mo ago

I love how all these 'brand' fonts look indistinguishable to an untrained eye and still brain-frying-bordedom-inducingly close to each other to someone like me who actually studied & worked in typography. Related: https://eidosdesign.substack.com/p/why-every-brand-looks-the-same-and https://eidosdesign.substack.com/p/why-every-brand-looks-the...

bensyverson 7mo ago
It's just the design team running in place. And at a certain scale, it's cheaper to pay a type foundry $100k once, rather than paying Monotype continuous fees for a legacy family. But as someone who has made multiple neutral sans families, I agree. The launch rhetoric about creating a differentiated visual identity is comical when you look at all the interchangeable corporate sans together.
dkuntz2 7mo ago
that's because a ton of them are just off the shelf fonts they had someone make minor changes to
bonoboTP 7mo ago
Pretty sure it's just the pendulum swinging. Today its all about serious and clean and minimal. Then it will be whimsical and maximalist again. Skinny jeans, baggy jeans. Skeumorphic, flat.
gguncth 7mo ago
The purpose of the brand font is to avoid paying licensing fees. Because the typefaces aren’t protected by copyright it’s usually enough to just have someone go and essentially clone an existing font. The whole thing is an artifact of peculiarities of IP law
- breakingcups 7mo ago
  Is that true, though? Wouldn't it be possible to just copy a font wholesale, since they are uncopyrightable? How would licensing fees be enforced?

huflungdung 7mo ago

[dead]

tavavex 7mo ago

I didn't know that many brands had their own bespoke fonts. Especially the less prominent players like Colgate or Korean Air. Was this caused by normal font licensing being so restrictive or expensive that they just decided to hire someone to make a font just for them, or design teams insisting that this sans serif that looks almost like all the others (but not quite) is essential to their design?

russdill 7mo ago
For most of these fonts, I feel fairly certain if someone gave me a sample I could identify the brand.
- mrweasel 7mo ago
  Remove the name from the font and I'm fairly certain that I'd get none of them, well maybe HP. E.g. the Klarna Headline is pretty distinct, but I've never seen it before. The four other Klarna fonts are super generic. Also why do they need five different fonts? Mostly I think these custom fonts are a waste of money. If you ship software that needs to include fonts, and you don't want to pay a license, it makes sense. If you do it because of "corporate identity" it seems pointless.
  - russdill 7mo ago
    Different people work differently I suppose. It's true that some of the fonts seem designed to be forgettable, such as Source, Product, Optimistic. But others are, like Netflix, Verizon, Korean Air, HP, and Colgate look heavily branded to me.
pixl97 7mo ago
>like Colgate It's still an 80 billion dollar company in market cap, so there is that. Also I'm guessing it's so they have another means of attack on knock off products that directly copy them.
wpm 7mo ago
I have respect for the design teams that at least just drop the bullshit and say "Yeah Inter is our font, whatever, who cares"

numbers 7mo ago

because they're brand fonts, none of them feel great to write more than a headline with

youniverse 7mo ago

I was just looking into the custom anthropic sans and serif fonts used for the claude app, I really like those!

Dwedit 7mo ago

The word YouTube really depends a lot on good kerning. The "YouTube Display" font has much better kerning around the uppercase T than the other three fonts that mention YouTube.

tempaccountabgd 7mo ago

[dead]