22 ms·
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
by 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 agoIs that true, though? Wouldn't it be possible to just copy a font wholesale, since they are uncopyrightable? How would licensing fees be enforced?
- hedora 7mo agoI think modern fonts include hinting software and stuff like that. If you produced a bunch of screenshots of the output at various sizes, and then asked an LLM to convert to ttf or whatever, I’m guessing that’d be OK. I’m not an expert in this stuff though.
- elcapitan 7mo agoBrand fonts are typically a specific license by the original creator of the font, often together with some adjustments (e.g. big companies often need additions for global markets that were not in the smaller original font)
- virtualritz 7mo agoMy comment was not on why but what. A brand is still free to commission a copy/clone of an 'interesting' font that has character (or, beware even serifs) ...
- JoshTriplett 7mo ago> The purpose of the brand font is to avoid paying licensing fees. There are more than enough good fonts under OFL that it surprises me people want to commission a custom font primarily for licensing reasons rather than using a standard one.