Comments on: Dodgy types

By: drcosmos

drcosmos — Fri, 14 May 2004 10:21:19 +0000

When will people realise that only two fonts are necessary to accomplish any typographical task: Times New Roman and Fraktur. Anything else is just a waste of time.

By: hatmandu

hatmandu — Fri, 14 May 2004 06:55:33 +0000

Indeedy, and the truth is a lot of the genuinely free ones are a bit crap, and few people use them. You can get loads of free versions of popular fonts, but they’re rarely the ones other people in your workflow are using, so the infringement issue persists.

[American accent]Wouldn’t the world just be a better place if we all used Comic Sans?[/Aa]

By: remotegoat

remotegoat — Fri, 14 May 2004 05:26:55 +0000

Blackheath v Collinwell 2003 Judge found in favour of the plaintiff, agreeing that urinating into the holy water during a christening could be deemed font infringement unless the church had given prior consent. Isaiah 36:12 was not considered a worthy defense.

By: rickbot

rickbot — Fri, 14 May 2004 03:23:29 +0000

Let’s ask Olivia on Sunday whether she’s aware of any font infringement cases occuring.

By: editor

editor — Fri, 14 May 2004 03:14:28 +0000

when there are hundreds of thousands of decent free fonts floating around.

I share this intuition, but it would be interesting to know how many of these really are free and how many have just become universally pirated.

By: rickbot

rickbot — Fri, 14 May 2004 03:06:45 +0000

I agree – I came in here to note that it sounds like the font factories are geared up towards the large publishing houses, who have both the financial resources and the aversion to legal risk necessary to make the font factories’ plans work. A wee stripling like Hawker shouldn’t be playing that game when there are hundreds of thousands of decent free fonts floating around.

I suppose, also, that if you want to look unique and don’t want others using your special font than the price has to be high to keep the use of it rare.

By: editor

editor — Fri, 14 May 2004 02:28:46 +0000

I have to say, I’m inclined to take the view that if they want to charge stupid money for a typeface then fuck ’em, there are plenty of other fonts out there that contain the same letters.

Then again, I see that Adobe Font Folio is $4,999 for use on ten computers (or, if you’re British, £4,385 + VAT – nice conversion rate there, guys). If there were a two-computer license available I reckon somewhere like Hawker might find a one-off payment of $1,000 worth the increased versatility and productivity. They’ve already wasted at least £50 just paying me to grapple with crazy font nonsense.

But speaking as an individual I doubt I’d consider it unless it were in the £300 sort of range; just because, frankly, though it does comprise a very large number of stunningly good fonts, having access to that doesn’t really bring in much extra money.