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Phinney on Fonts
* About
* Consultant and Expert Witness
* Type Design & Font Making Resources
BLOG
* MORE OF MY FONTS/ TYPOGRAPHY ANSWERS COMING HERE!
Back around 2013–2021, I really liked Quora. I could go through questions
people asked, find interesting questions that I was especially qualified to
answer (mostly about fonts and typography), and write up an informative
answer that people would read and upvote. Comments and further questions in
the discussion to each of my Quora answers would help me refine and improve
them.
I could similarly find and read interesting thoughts and analysis on darn
near any topic of interest. I accumulated favorite writers and would often
read Quora as a leisure activity, just for intellectual interest. It was a
social network focused on ideas.
Quora has since mostly turned to junk. At this point, I don’t even have any
confidence as to how long the site will even continue to be up. Or if it is
still up, will the content be freely available? Findable? So I have been
revising and saving my best answers here, to trickle out over time.
Why did Quora turn to crap? This is the process Cory Doctorow calls
enshittification. They were getting participation and views, but without
making money. The site needed to figure out how it would make money. So they
experimented in a bunch of different ways to try to increase “reader
engagement” and reduce costs… and in the process lost everything I liked
about it.
In the case of Quora, some particular things included:
* Making it harder to find the answers to a question. The default when you
click on a question is now to show “all related” answers instead of the
answers to the current question… which means you have to read more and
click more to get the info you actually want.
* Rewarding people for asking questions (through the “Quora Partner
Program”) instead of focusing on getting good answers. Worse, specifically
rewarding questions that upset people as long as they got responses.
Responses pointing out problems in the question itself are still
responses, so… you can see where that path leads.
* Allowing anonymous questions. Yes, there are totally legitimate reasons
for question- askers to want to be anonymous. But the proportion of junk
and trolling skyrocketed after this change.
* Doing all the above while reducing their staff of moderators.
* Most of the above factors contributed to spam, misinformation, and low-
quality content
* At first, it was just more bad content. BUT, the spam, low- quality
content and user- hostile interface decisions drove away many of the best
contributors (myself included, obviously). So now the fraction of “good
content” is much worse, not only because the denominator grew out of
control, but the numerator also shrank.
Quora’s “Top Writers” program lasted from 2013–18, coinciding with peak
Quora. There weren’t any huge perks, just a little recognition, a badge on
your Quora profile. But still, it was nice. It was not a big enough deal that
it made it onto my c.v.—but I did link to my Quora answers. I just deleted
that link on my c.v., because being associated at all with Quora seems like a
negative.
But now Quora has been overrun with spam and fake questions plus hate speech
and bullying. I won’t yank my existing answers (already often revised and
polished over time), but I am polishing and further revising the best ones,
and will post them here. I have already copied a couple dozen of my best
answers to draft posts here, edited and posted the first couple, and done
some light editing on most of the others (with more to come). I may set them
to auto- post periodically.
That all makes me sad, but at least I was able to slurp up a whole bunch of
my existing content and plan to re-post.
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November 18, 2024
* WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FONTS AND UNICODE CHARACTERS?
> “It is my understanding that not all fonts contain the Unicode character
> set. Are they contained in certain fonts or are they independent? If a code
> does not exist in a font then what is used?”
>
> Older version of this originally published at
> https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-relationship-between-Fonts-and-Unicode-characters/answer/Thomas-Phinney
Unicode is the standard for characters in computing. It assigns a unique code
to each character. So for example the capital A is a character. Some things
that look the same are different characters, so for example the cap Alpha and
cap A usually look the same, but get different Unicode numbers.
A font can contain zero or more glyphs—a glyph is a single slot in the font
that usually contains a representation of … something, a letter or symbol. In
most cases, one glyph represents one character, although sometimes more than
one glyph can be used for one character (for example, an accented character
can be composed from a base character plus a combining accent), or more than
one character can be represented by a single glyph (for example, a ligature,
such as the o- f- f- i ligature in Caflisch Script).
Aside from such complications, usually most (often nearly all) of the glyphs
in a font have Unicode codepoints (numbers) assigned to them. If a glyph does
not have a Unicode codepoint, it might be related to a Unicode value via an
OpenType feature. So for example, the ‘liga’ ligature feature in Caflisch
Script would have code that says, if you have the sequence o- f- f- i then
replace it with the ligature glyph named “o_ f_ f_ i”. So while that ligature
glyph does not have a single or direct Unicode codepoint, it is related to a
group of characters that do have Unicode codepoints.
When it comes to combining accents (more technically called “diacritics” by
font geeks), the Unicode standard itself has info about some characters that
can be assembled from other characters. For common western European languages
this is all pretty straightforward: Unicode has codepoints assigned to
combinations such as é and ü, as well as separate ideas of special “combining
accent” characters that can go with the base letter to make the combo. But
Unicode does not have all the possible combinations as predefined characters,
so even for characters such as a–z plus diacritics needed by some African
languages, there is not precombined character, in the computer it is only
represented as base-letter-plus-combining-diacritic.
For many languages, including Indic languages, Arabic, and others, the
processing is even more complex. Let’s just say that the further we are from
the simple confines of English the less often it is true that one character
equals exactly one glyph.
An average western- language font has about 200 to 400 glyphs. A more
extensive one might have 500 to 700, and a really extensive one thousands
(2000–5000). Fonts for other writing systems such as Chinese or Japanese
routinely have 5,000, 10,000 or even 20,000 glyphs, but because of that, and
the complexity of the individual glyphs, there are fewer such fonts designed.
“Not all fonts contain the Unicode character set” is an understatement. No
single font on earth contains the entire Unicode character set, and perhaps
no single font ever will. Unicode currently defines about 150,000 characters,
is updated (and expanded) annually, and currently there is a 64K limit on the
number of encoded glyphs in a font (in any major format, anyway).
The Unicode character set is completely independent of specific fonts,
although specific fonts may attempt to be thorough in covering particular
sections of Unicode. (And the origins of Unicode include trying to be a
superset of all preexisting font encoding standards.)
“If a code does not exist in a font then what is used?” Aside from cases
where the character might be assembled from others (like with the combining
accents mentioned previously), if a called- for Unicode character is not
supported in any way in the currently selected font, then the behavior still
depends on the application and the operating system. In some cases a “notdef”
glyph may be shown to indicate a missing glyph in the current font—more
common with high- end graphics apps such as Adobe Creative Cloud. Many apps
and environments will at least attempt to do font fallback, substituting some
other font that does support the desired character. In such cases the right
letter or symbol will appear, but in a different font! This is why sometimes
you will see a document where most of the characters are in one font, but
perhaps an accented character or something else less common is in a clearly
non- matching font.
In extreme cases (more common for especially rare or newly- defined
characters), even environments that do attempt such fallback may fail to find
a match because they have no font that supports the character in question! In
such situations, one may still see a notdef, or get fallback to a
special Last Resort font. (I have a whole separate article about the notdef,
pending!)
See also: Fallback font – Wikipedia
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November 10, 2024
* “WHAT DOES IT COST TO HAVE A CUSTOM TYPEFACE DESIGNED?”
“For example, how much would it cost (roughly) for someone like Hoefler to
design a new font family for Mastercard?”
(Originally a Quora question, and my Quora answer. But given Quora’s
increasingly anti- user choices, I migrated the question here and updated my
answer for current pricing.)
For a typeface of four styles, from a famous name type designer, with
temporary exclusivity, you are probably looking at $100,000–250,000 and up as
a rough ballpark. It might take them a year or more, although that won’t
necessarily be full time on your typeface. This assumes no horribly extensive
OpenType features, just basic ligatures and oldstyle figures, maybe small
caps. I’m also assuming a western + CE character set (which is pretty common
these days).
For ~ the same thing from a decently established but not famous type
designer, you might expect to pay $30,000–75,000, roughly.
One rare public sharing of info about what a designer/ foundry “should”
charge was from Bruno Maag of Dalton Maag, a fairly prestigious type designer
/ foundry. He wrote “IMO, I think that a price of around US$ 20- 25k per
weight is appropriate for a Western European glyph set (ANSII), giving the
client three years exclusivity. If they want to own the rights, double the
price.” (December 2013 price quotation for a new custom
font on typedrawers.com.) Add about 65% for inflation to 2024, then reduce
that to only 50% because of heavy competition in type design, and that would
make it about $30–38k per style.
So with permanent exclusivity, maybe double the price to USD $60–76K per
style. Add CE coverage as well as exclusivity, but no small caps, and that
“suggested price” perhaps goes to $70–88K per style. (Bruno says “weight” but
presumably means style, so a regular four- member family is four
styles—although only two literal weights, plus their matching italics.)
From a designer early in their career, or based in a developing country, or
if the customer has lower quality expectations than mine and is willing to go
with somebody who does lower quality and faster work, or some combination of
such factors, you could end up with considerably lower prices, as low as
$8,000–25,000 per font style.
Now, all this gets kind of weird and warped once one gets into variable
fonts. Those might be prices per master, and then add somewhere between a
quarter and half again at the end, depending on how extreme the masters are.
Some designers (e.g. John Hudson at Tiro Typeworks) try to figure out how
complex the typeface design is in general, and then charge a price- per-
glyph for that typeface. They figure that easier and harder glyphs will
average out over the whole set. This seems reasonable to me, and I gather he
is happy with it. (I have tried to estimate work by actually assessing a
difficulty multiplier individually on different glyphs, and that was an
absurd amount of work. I do not generally recommend it unless you have a
specific reason, such as needing to assess relative work done by different
people on the same project.)
These are pretty rough guidelines, based on my own experience in soliciting
fonts for development from a variety of type designers, what I have been
paid, my discussions with other type designers, plus discussions among type
designers in a couple of fora.
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June 15, 2024
* “DO COMPANIES GET SUED FOR USING FONTS ILLEGALLY?”
Originally posted on Quora, in response to a user question. Due to Quora’s
increasingly desperate and user- hostile changes, I revised and reposted it
here.
Last update 29 May 2024.
Yes, companies often get threatened with legal action, and (less often) if
they do not pay for their font use, get sued. Many companies have been: (1)
threatened with legal action, (2) pretty much forced to pay what they already
should have, and/ or (3) sued for using fonts in unlicensed ways.
Sometimes (but rarely) these cases are dismissed. Usually they are settled,
outside the courtroom. The only case I can think of that was even partially
decided by the court was Adobe vs SSI, way back in 1998, wherein Adobe won a
partial summary judgment on a number of key points. But even this was more a
corporate piracy case involving people selling ripped- off fonts rather than
a normal business- use case. In general, the business and personal use cases
never get as far as being decided by a court.
Software and services have spring up around this. There are apps for managing
fonts both for individuals and across organizations (Connect Fonts, FontBase,
and others), and legal compliance concerns are part of their appeal. Some
font management apps have been renamed (Suitcase Fusion and Universal Type
Server are now Extensis Connect Fonts) or discontinued (so many, notably
FontXplorer). There are entire businesses set up around font license
compliance consulting, and services that help font foundries find unlicensed
font use on the web (and optionally collect money for them).
Here are over 20 lawsuits around unlicensed font use. I have excluded cases
where a type designer, font foundry or distributor has sued another type
designer, foundry or distributor, although that happens occasionally as well.
* Nike Sued for Allegedly Using Unlicensed Fonts in Advertising &
Marketing (Feb 2023, Production Type v Nike)
* Into the Sparkly Heart of Zazzle’s Font War (Nov 2022, Nicky Laatz v
Zazzle) (disclaimer: I am an expert witness in this case)
* Shake Shack Accuses Typeface Co. of Font IP “Shakedown” (Sept 2022, Shake
Shack v. House Industries) OK, this one is actually a reverse, where Shake
Shack is suing House for threatening legal action in the first place.
* Rite Aid says TM lawsuit over logo is poorly designed (May 2022, Brand
Design d.b.a. House Industries v Rite-Aid)
* Banana Republic in legal battle over distinctive ampersand (Nov 2020,
Moshik Nadav)
* Miracle Mop inventor “stole” my font for her new logo: lawsuit (Oct 2019,
Moshik Nadav claims wrong license for logo font)
* Font Diner sues Haribo over packaging design of its Halloween sweets (Nov
2017 for $150,000)
* A Different “Type” of Lawsuit (Berthold vs Target over Akzidenz- Grotesk,
Oct 2017, $150,000 per infringement)
* Font Maker Sues Universal Music over Vamps logo (Hype for Type vs
Universal Music Group over Vamps logo usage, Aug 2017, $1.25M plus
destruction of infringing materials)
* Berthold says Volvo violated its copyright regarding typeface (Jun 2017,
$1.5M)
* Cher wins dismissal of lawsuit over album cover font (Moshik Nadav sued
Cher, but dropped the case in March 2017)
* French anti- piracy agency used unlicensed, proprietary font (Jean
François Porchez threatened to sue the anti- piracy agency for,
essentially piracy, 2016) Connexion France, Boing Boing / Doctorow
* My Little Pony toymaker sued over alleged font misuse – BBC News (Font
Bros vs Hasbro over Generation B, Jan 2016, $150,000 per infringement)
* Berthold sues Scripps Networks Interactive (PDF download) (Aug 2014)
* Microsoft Sued for $1.5 Million Over Hebrew Type Font (Sep 2013, $1.5M)
* FontDiner v CafePress (April 2013, $900,000+)
* Mixpanel sued for $2 million over font in shared Tumblr theme by Font
Diner (Mar 2013, $2M)
* NBCUniversal Sued for $3.5 Million Over Font Theft…Again (Exclusive) /
NBC Universal sued for $3.5 million for font license infringement by
Brand Design a.k.a. House Industries (July 2012 $3.5M)
* Lawsuit Claims TNT’s “Falling Skies” Has a Font Problem by +ISM Studios
(Jan 2012, $200,000)—this was settled out of court, details unknown.
* Copyright and Web Fonts: Santorum Web Developer Sued for Typeface
Infringement in Typotheque v Raise Digital (Aug 2011, $2M)
* Harry Potter and the Dangers of Font Non- Compliance / NBC Universal
Accused of Million- Dollar ‘Harry Potter’ Font Theft by P22 (Jul
2011)—this was settled out of court, details unknown.
* Font Bureau clashes with NBC over font licensing (Oct 2009, $2M)
* Lawsuit details and settlement (Feb 2010)
* The above list stops in 2010. It also excludes lawsuits between designers/
foundries/ distributors. There is one I believe must be mentioned, because
one of the very few font copyright cases to proceed to any kind of
conclusion in the USA, with summary judgment on the matter of whether
Adobe’s digital fonts were protected by copyright (the judge found they
were, but his decision is not precedential, although nonetheless widely
followed as one of the few “clues” as to how a court might find on these
issues).
* Adobe v SSi (1995–98).
Sometimes these things stop short of a lawsuit, but can still be pretty
unpleasant. I don’t actually buy the old saying “there is no such thing as
bad publicity”:
* Anti- piracy agency’s logo broke copyright – Telegraph (Jan 2010)
There exist multiple online scanners that look for fonts posted online or
used in web sites. Some are owned by major retailers/ distributors, but at
least one is available to any type designer or foundry that wants to pay for
it (license infringement monitoring/ DMCA service aka Fontdata aka
TypeSnitch) which might or might not be the same thing as Font Radar.
Heck, I won’t name the offending party, but in one of my day jobs, we once
got a nasty cease- and- desist email from a lawyer from a well- known font
company—I knew the owners and had been to their offices! The lawyer claimed
we were using two different fonts, in different ways, illegally. He was
wrong, of course, but we still got the letter. (And never heard back from the
lawyer when we explained how he was mistaken.)
Cases such as the one Sergey Yakunin cites of Sberbank with Fedra Sans and
Fedra Serif are not unusual, it is just that one usually doesn’t hear about
them. Often they are pursued without major public attention. Lots of
negotiations behind the scenes, the foundry usually gets paid what they
should have in the first place, and maybe not everyone is happy, but at least
things are resolved in some vaguely reasonable way.
Here are a couple more high- profile unlicensed use cases that are well-
known in the industry (discussed in public forums, etc.) but did not get
major media attention:
* UPS unlicensed use (via FutureBrand) of FontShop’s FF Dax. FutureBrand
admitted nothing, but the settlement agreement did pay FontShop $17,500.
See the anonymized press release and ensuing discussion: FontShop and
Unnamed Firm Reach Agreement (2006, Typophile via Yves Peters)
* Starbucks unlicensed use of P22 Cezanne
* UK Home Office used personal- use- only “Plane Crash” font without
license: Font designer could sue over “go home” vans
For more like that, see also:
* ILLEGAL USE OF TYPEFACE!
* Hidden Typography exposed
And finally, a general piece on font piracy, from Wired Magazine.
ADDENDUM
The original question I was answering on Quora featured these details in a
comment (one of the things the “new Quora” unhelpfully suppresses!): “I am
starting a new company. I have found a font that I want to use on my website
(est. traffic 10 000/ month). I have purchased desktop license, though if I
understand correctly, I am not allowed to use it on my website. Do companies
actually get sued for using fonts illegally?”
For their particular case, I’ll point out that the licensing required, at
that volume level, tends to be pretty cheap. They would waste more money- as-
time reading the links in this post than just getting legal, either for a
one- time fee, or something like $25/ year (low- end rate for Adobe Typekit).
Or even free if one uses Google Fonts, though that would not get them the
commercial fonts you are talking about.
Also, illegal use of a font on a web site is something you are doing in
public, and accessible to web crawlers and the like—as previously mentioned
above. I know of at least one general- purpose service for scanning for
illegal font use, and I know of at least one foundry that runs their own bots
to scan for their fonts being used illegally. So if I was going to use a font
illegally, the one way I definitely would not try to do so would be on a web
site as a web font!
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May 27, 2024
* WHY DID ADOBE DISCONTINUE FONT CHAMELEON IN THE 90S?
Back in the mid to late 90s, Adobe acquired a company called Ares Software.
Ares made font- related software products, including doing the programming
(but not owning or distributing) of Letraset FontStudio, which in its day was
one of the best font editors. They are best known for a remarkable
application and technology called Font Chameleon.
* Video of Font Chameleon in action
* Explanations of Font Chameleon
There is a popular myth that Adobe bought Font Chameleon to kill a
threatening technology. Actually, no, removing it from the market was not a
motivation for the acquisition. The team that made fonts and would have cared
one way or another had nothing to do with those decisions, and were simply
not interested in Font Chameleon.
Adobe’s purchase of Ares was done to acquire Font Chameleon technology, and
was entirely driven by the PostScript group at Adobe, to use the technology
for font compression purposes to fit more, cheaper, in the ROM of PostScript
3 printers. All Ares retail products (not just Font Chameleon) were
discontinued as Adobe put the two Ares principals to work on adapting the
Chameleon tech for Adobe’s use.
(Also, Font Chameleon was in some respects massively more powerful than MM,
but also had huge limitations. It could only handle the axes it knew about,
and could only handle the characters it knew about.)
I joined Adobe in mid- 1997, shortly after the acquisition, and thought it
was an interesting tech. I ended up deeply involved in helping make the whole
system work together (chameleon fonts in ROM including CE fonts, printer
drivers, and supposedly matching fonts on end user computers). All the
systems were optimized to make an individual piece work in a static
environment, according to known schema. Real end- to- end testing of these
things hadn’t really been needed in years. But because there were numerous
technical changes being made at the same time to all these pieces, suddenly
end- to- end testing was critical. I got involved in pointing that out and
pushing everyone to make sure their pieces played together instead of them
all trying to point at specs that had been made before any of the pieces
actually existed.
Through some internal asking around at Adobe, I was able to get my hands on
Ares’ Font Chameleon editor: the company’s internal tool used to make a
Chameleon “font descriptor” that could be blended with others. These font
descriptors as individual files were also super compact, which is why the
PostScript team wanted the tech. They relied on a (large) mutatable
“master” font , plus the descriptors; the master + descriptors for 136
PostScript 3 fonts were a LOT smaller than the set of fonts themselves, and
allowed support for central European accented characters with hardly any size
impact.
What was super interesting to me was how insanely fast it was to create such
a font descriptor—which could also be exported as a stand- alone font if one
wished, not to mention instantly manipulated in weight, width, x- height,
etcetera. At the time I thought it could have been an incredible rapid
prototyping tool. With it I could do in a day what would otherwise take me
weeks. But the limitations of the tech, and tendency to encourage some degree
of blandification meant… nobody in a position of power and influence within
the type group was interested. They had looked at it, and decided it had
inferior results and wasn’t worth pursuing.
It is also worth noting that the lead programmers from Ares were freakin’
brilliant, but the code was not entirely stable/ reliable. I certainly had
quite a few crashes using the Chameleon editor—although to be fair, it was
only intended as an internal app, not a retail/ external app.
So, Font Chameleon died because the Adobe hardware team that bought it wanted
it for underlying tech, and didn’t do retail software products. Whereas the
team that did retail fonts had no interest in it, thought there were quality
issues, and there was a general perception that maintaining/ developing any
of the Ares products as retail software would have been painful.
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February 22, 2023
* FONT DETECTIVE FORENSIC TYPOGRAPHY ASSISTANT NEEDED
Hello, Watson!
UPDATE 25 DEC: Just thought I should say that yes I picked someone (out of
many highly qualified—or even overqualified—applicants). They are choosing to
stay anonymous for now, but have been doing a lovely job so far!
UPDATE 23 NOV: (1) Good lord, I have a lot of applicants. Application
deadline will be Nov 24 at 8 am US Pacific time, and yes that is Thanksgiving
for us. (2) By “very occasional, part- time work” I mean maybe 3 hours, or 6,
or 16, all in a week or two… and then maybe nothing for weeks or even months.
This is just an occasional brief gig. Over time it might become more. Or
perhaps not. The task of sample clipping is the main thing I have come up
with, and will be an ongoing one. It is pretty darn tedious, sorry. (3) Added
a couple more details in the body.
This is currently very occasional, part- time work. Many of my cases from my
detective work involve things like time consuming fiddly data collection,
which I don’t have time to continue doing all by myself. A particular case at
hand involves about a dozen documents. To demonstrate what the font is, part
of my method involves taking samples of some specific letters (defined by me)
from the documents. This amounts to clipping graphic images (from a PDF or
image file, via Acrobat or Photoshop) and pasting them into a table (in Word
or possibly InDesign). It is pretty rote work. In this case, like most of
them, we already know what the typeface is when we go to do this clipping:
the problem is to demonstrate that to the court. So, we take these laborious
samples and make a pretty chart. And for a particular case at hand, instead
of the usual one document and just maybe two, there are many. And a deadline
in December.
I have more than a bit too much total work for the rest of this year, so I am
looking for somebody to do this task, on this and future cases. Currently I
define which characters are worth collecting samples of, but that is
something I could potentially hand off in the future. Or perhaps we both
pick some.
This could quite possibly lead to other work; it depends on your skills and
what you bring to the table. There are times when I could use somebody to
research some issue… I would give an example from a current case, but I
definitely shouldn’t say it. Sigh.
The work pays well, and I am happy to share some of that.
Email me if you have my email, or just use the comment function to give me
your email address and a link to your resume or a description of your
background. (I won’t publish these comments!) Obviously some design and
typography background is a bonus, but then again, this is also pretty basic,
for now. Brains are the most important resource. No promise of growth and
advancement, but I certainly wouldn’t rule it out!
This will require signing a non- disclosure agreement. I will let you know
what you can say about any given case at hand, but it is often nothing, or
pretty minimal. Even afterwards, most cases remain largely confidential. The
ones we can talk about are a distinct minority.
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November 22, 2022
* FONT DETECTIVE TALK IN DUBLIN, 16 NOV 2022
This Wednesday night at 6 pm, I will be doing a presentation about my font
detective work in Dublin! Come on by—it’s free and no advance registration is
needed. (Note however there is no on- campus parking: transit or bicycle
recommended, else park on the street nearby.)
Location: TU Dublin, East Quad (I am told there will be a sign- in desk at
the entrance)
Time: 6 pm! will run maybe an hour to an hour and a half, with Q&A
Cost: Free!
I am in Dublin to do a Crafting Type workshop (Thurs–Sat) at TU Dublin,
before a visit to London for one of my current cases! The good folks with
Typography Ireland at the Uni asked me to do a wee talk about my forensic
font work….
I shall discuss and show evidence from four forensic cases, including The
Case of the Concealed Credits (featuring Justin Timberlake and will.i.am),
the Respected Rabbi, the Canadian Caper, and the Secret of the Certificate. I
am the world’s only ongoing “font detective”; as a global expert on fonts,
typography and printing, I do font- related document forensics in legal cases
around the world. The stakes can be fortune, fame, careers, imprisonment, the
family house, or the provenance of one of the world’s most valuable artworks.
Blackletter glyphs from The Secret of the Certificate a different
certificate, the s’micha from The Respected Rabbi
About me: I have been doing font forensics since I testified about a forged
will back in 1999. My list of expert witness clients includes a “big three”
auto maker and a major California city. I have been consulted on questioned
documents by BBC News, The Washington Post, PBS television’s
“History Detectives,” NPR, the US Treasury, and many others. I am also a type
designer who has created fonts for Adobe and Google. I am the former CEO of
FontLab, and previously had strategic/ technical font product management
roles at Adobe and Extensis. I was on the board of ATypI, the international
typography association, from 2004–20. I have four patents and a medal, as
well as an MS in printing & typography from RIT, and an MBA from UC Berkeley.
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November 14, 2022
* FONT PRODUCTION PERSON NEEDED, FIRST HALF 2021
NOTE: The position has been filled!
QUALIFICATIONS:
* Font production experience (which might be mostly type design)
* Variable font development experience, preferably with multiple axes
* Bonus if you have worked with design space that did not have axes in the
corners.
* Already qualified as a supplier with Google (and hence under non-
disclosure agreement)
* FontLab 6/ 7 experience highly desirable, but not required
* Technical skills including Python scripting are a plus
* Happy doing unusual font production that is possibly even more fiddly and
repetitive than the usual
FEATURES
* Remote work, any location possible!
* Flexible work hours. (I am on US Pacific time, however.)
* early January through May 2021
* Expected hours/ month dependent on experience and productivity
* Working with me (Thomas Phinney) and Vassil Kateliev on project, with
Google as our client
DETAILS
WHAT? I have been commissioned to continue a variable font project I started
this year with Google. In 2020, I did a first version with a weight axis, but
now I need to do a big expansion in 2021—with two more axes. The work is
primarily adding further masters to an existing typeface, not original design
work. Given the desired timeline, there is too much work and not enough time
for me to do it solo.
WHEN? This would start at or near the beginning of January and run through
May.
WHO? So I am looking for one more person to help work on it in FontLab 7;
currently it is me plus some help from Vassil Kateliev. This will be work for
hire, and the resulting typeface will be owned by Google (not open source).
Vassil is our scripting guru, and can do some amazing things with
automation—his contributions in that regard were invaluable in the version 1
project. This time he will likely also have some hands- on production role. I
will do considerable production work myself.
PUBLIC? Unlike some of my/ our recent projects, this isn’t open source, and I
can’t yet talk about it publicly. For candidates who seem plausible, I will
get you to sign an NDA with Google, and then I can tell you the details, and
we can talk more!
MONEY. This involves a fixed amount of money, with the hours dependent on
your experience/ productivity. Although I am doing the primary screening and
will be supervising the work, you will negotiate pay with Google, and be paid
by Google (monthly after the end of each month).
COMMENTARY. This is not artistically interesting work, but it is somewhat
technically interesting, and you are working with some arguably nice people.
Pay is OK, and it may lead directly or indirectly to future work. It will be
a high- profile project, but I am sorry to say it is not yet known if we will
be able to talk about our contributions afterward.
DIVERSITY. Diverse applicants are especially welcome.
PROCESS:
Contact me with the form below. If you seem like a plausible candidate, I
will have Google share a non- disclosure agreement (NDA) with you; you
signing the NDA will allow me to explain the job in more detail.
Note that getting the NDA requires your postal address, and company name
if any.
Name(required)
Your Company Name(“none” if you do not have a legal entity beyond
yourself)(required)
Email(required)
Mailing Address(required)
Links (to c.v./résumé and showings of your work; or you can share those in
email after I reply to you)
Message
Contact Thomas
Δ
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December 17, 2020
* SCIENCE GOTHIC—DESIGN/PRODUCTION PERSON NEEDED
(UPDATE: Applications are closed. I definitely have enough qualified people
to consider! Anyone who expressed interest should have heard from me before
5 pm PST, August 6th, 2019.)
Today I got back a signed contract, commissioning Font Detective LLC to do a
new version of the classic American Type Founders’ typeface Bank Gothic
(Morris Fuller Benton, 1930–34), for Google Fonts.
UPDATE: We are calling it Science Gothic.
This will be a multi- axis Variable Font. I have done a fair bit of
prototyping, but there is lots of work ahead! And, given the timeline, too
much work and not enough time for me to do it solo.
Freelance Type Design — Open Source Bank Gothic, FontLab VI
The new Bank Science Gothic will have an extended Latin and Cyrillic
character set (about 1200 glyphs). It has weight, width and contrast axes,
plus an oblique axis as well. I am looking for at least one more person
(maybe two) to help work on it in FontLab VI; currently it is me and one p/ t
person.
The typeface has 3 x 3 masters for weight/ width, and then double that again
for contrast (and again for italics, although that will be basically oblique
and largely automated). Luckily the square- geometric design is well- suited
to this treatment and makes for mostly easier editing.
An initial demo- ready deadline will be the end of August. Full- time
availability preferred, although the first week or so may be a bit slower.
Aiming to have the font final in late November. This will be work for hire,
and the resulting typeface will be open source, and licensed under the Open
Font License.
More Bank Gothic in use—it’s everywhere! (Avengers Endgame movie title in the
film, for instance.) But this is our chance to make it massively more
versatile and flexible, and available to everyone.
How to apply: email me directly, or just leave a comment here (I won’t
publish it) with your email address. I will send a link to a more detailed
job description and more info!
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July 29, 2019
* CAREER CHANGE!
In early June, I will be leaving FontLab! My Font Detective work continues to
grow beyond what works with a full- time day job. I am also looking for other
gigs that are compatible with said investigations!
I am pleased with many things FontLab has accomplished for its customers in
my time there, and have written about what we have done over on the FontLab
blog. It has been a fun ride, and I wish my colleagues nothing but the best!
But the time has come to move on and do other things.
What was once just occasional expert witness and related work has kept
growing, and become quite frequent since I launched my “Font Detective”
expert witness web site, a year ago—and even more so in recent months due to
publicity around a particularly high- profile case in Canada (see the Toronto
Star and National Post articles).
But I can’t keep up with this, while also being full- time CEO of FontLab.
Yet the pay relative to time is excellent for the detective gig, it is quite
fun, and I can imagine doing it part- time into retirement 20 years from now…
so rather than restricting it to a sideline, I am now doubling down on it.
This is a bit tricky, seeing as the detective work is incompatible with being
full- time CEO, yet also not quite at the volume/ reliability to fully
replace that full- time work. Hence, I am looking for other part- time or
temp gigs that are compatible with my “consulting font detective” work:
* Font consulting—design, technical, business, and other. Are you a foundry
or type designer who needs some one- on- one review and lessons to up your
type design game? Have a font tech problem that needs solving?
* Type design on my own and/ or for clients
* Teaching, whether training people on FontLab VI, teaching type design, or
other gigs. (This could include, but is not limited to, reviving the
lately- dormant Crafting Type workshops.)
Talking about font detective cases at Typo San Francisco, 2012.
© 2012 Amber Gregory, FontShop, CC- BY.
Contact Ms Gregory.
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