Monotype-oly

September 2, 2023 4:14 PM

Fonts are a ubiquitous commodity. Every font you see — on your computer screen, a street sign, a T-shirt, or your car’s dashboard — has been crafted by a designer. With 4.5k independent artists selling on MyFonts today, many struggle to attract customers and to make a living in an oversaturated market. It’s only getting harder, as designers must compete with and abide by the terms of one company that’s approaching behemoth status: Monotype. from Where do fonts come from? This one business, mostly
posted by chavenet (31 comments total)

Oh please. The compensation is equal to the labor. It's ridiculously easy to design a font now. It's antique copyright laws and artificial scarcity that are the problem.
posted by metametamind at 5:46 PM on September 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's also never been easier to make a song or a novel. Are music and storytelling also being hampered by "artificial scarcity"?

If artists aren't fairly compensated, you won't get more art no matter how "ridiculously easy" it is to make.
posted by multics at 6:04 PM on September 2, 2023 [8 favorites]

Monotype.
Now thats misleading font people.

"In 2019, private equity firm HGGC bought Monotype for $825m, acquiring its roster of typefaces and setting it up for even more acquisitions. The company has since purchased URW Foundry and Hoefler & Co., a renowned independent foundry."

It's fun sometimes to trace aquistion.
like Fram air filter jostling between Ohio and Michigan. {wanders}
posted by clavdivs at 6:12 PM on September 2, 2023 [6 favorites]

Is a font equivalent to a song? From where I’m standing, it’s much closer to an effects pedal or a synth pad. When you’ve got 40,000 effects pedals at your fingertips, eventually it’s just… enough? I hate to admit it, since I’ve got plenty of graphic designer friends, but things have changed since the pre-digital days and they’re not going back. The tinkerers will continue tinkering away at new designs, but that’s a passion, not a career that anyone’s owed.
posted by not just everyday big moggies at 6:20 PM on September 2, 2023 [4 favorites]

Having seen what goes into designing a good font (taste is relative, but there's acres of symbols and widths and spacing combinations that all have to be worked out for it to be fully functional), I would not say making a font is easy.
posted by jellywerker at 6:26 PM on September 2, 2023 [33 favorites]

The interesting thing to me about Monotype is that typefaces cannot be copyrighted in the US, and in other countries copyright law about typefaces is often different than it is for other works of art. (In Germany type gets shortened protection. Japan is a no copyright for type zone. Ireland is fully protected. I don't even know what the UK has going on, and so on.) So Monotype does a workaround using software copyrights and license agreements, but, like, given a decent sample, a competitor could recreate almost the entire Monotype library, and it wouldn't even be misappropriation. They'd miss fonts that are dynamically generated on the fly, and they'd likely have to make their own rules for, like, kerning or any automatic ligatures, but those aren't things that are beyond a decent designer.

In practice, copies like that are hardly ever as good as the original, and designers may find it unethical to use the copy.

Anyway, typeface design is an example of what it looks like when artists work without the benefit of copyright. Is it surprising that the actual typeface artists are underpaid, that a bogus copyright method was invented, or that it's all watched over by a monopoly? I don't know.
posted by surlyben at 6:37 PM on September 2, 2023 [4 favorites]

It's ridiculously easy to design a font now.

I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and quietly repeat to myself, “I will not argue on the internet.”

You know what? Relative to casting all those metal letterforms, sure. Why not. In that light, it is easy.
posted by TangoCharlie at 6:42 PM on September 2, 2023 [31 favorites]

given a decent sample, a competitor could recreate almost the entire Monotype library, and it wouldn't even be misappropriation

🚨🚨Stuart Semple, please report to the extraordinarily black courtesy phone🚨🚨
posted by not just everyday big moggies at 6:47 PM on September 2, 2023 [4 favorites]

If artists aren't fairly compensated, you won't get more art no matter how "ridiculously easy" it is to make.

I don't think this is true.

(Yes, artists should be fairly compensated. No, art will not disappear if they're not. Art will happen no matter what.)
posted by lhauser at 6:51 PM on September 2, 2023 [7 favorites]

If artists aren't fairly compensated, you won't get more art no matter how "ridiculously easy" it is to make.


To settle this question, ask yourself: Did art and music exist before people were specifically paid to create it? Folk art historians would say "yes".
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 6:55 PM on September 2, 2023 [7 favorites]

Wow, I didn't know they had gotten Hoefler too.

Monotypelopoly.
posted by freakazoid at 7:05 PM on September 2, 2023 [4 favorites]

brb spinning up a font-designing LLM*

*Large Ligature Model
posted by glonous keming at 7:18 PM on September 2, 2023 [12 favorites]

In practice, copies like that are hardly ever as good as the original, and designers may find it unethical to use the copy

In practice nobody notices. I’ve seen presentations where the designer switched back and forth between Arial and Helvetica on the same slide to prove that point.
posted by mhoye at 7:59 PM on September 2, 2023 [6 favorites]

A reminder that capital serving the needs of humans is generally only possible through good fortune or hard, often violent work. If we had governments that took care of our basic needs we wouldn’t need to keep praying to the economic gods to keep the value of certain works up so that creators could live.
posted by wemayfreeze at 8:45 PM on September 2, 2023 [6 favorites]

In practice nobody notices.

Aw, come on, now you are going to make the font nerds sad.

Years ago I met someone who worked in a print shop design department that used pretty much exclusively CorelDRAW for font matching (CorelDRAW came with lookalike fonts with different names... I don't know if they still do that, this was probably 20+ years ago). She was a little sheepish about it, but I didn't get the impression that the clients ever noticed or cared.
posted by surlyben at 8:49 PM on September 2, 2023 [6 favorites]

honestly just about the worst thing you can do to someone is to teach them to recognize the difference between Arial and Helvetica
posted by DoctorFedora at 9:18 PM on September 2, 2023 [25 favorites]

So Monotype does a workaround using software copyrights and license agreements, but, like, given a decent sample, a competitor could recreate almost the entire Monotype library, and it wouldn't even be misappropriation.

A while ago I learned that this exact thing has happened at least once before: Bitstream made their own digitizations of Linotype's font library and sold their versions at cut-rate prices. They were also included with CorelDRAW. I know this because a place I used to work at in university had the Bitstream fonts installed, which we dutifully used for the publications we made.

An interesting quirk of font copyright is that apparently font NAMES can be protected, even if the typefaces themselves can't be. So for the longest time, I knew many classic fonts not by their original names, but by their weird Bitstream names like Humanist 521 (Gill Sans), Humanist 777 (Frutiger), or Swiss 721 (Helvetica). Later I'd be introduced to the original fonts and think about how similar they looked to the ones I used in university. Only years later did I finally put two and two together and realize what was going on.
posted by chrominance at 9:57 PM on September 2, 2023 [13 favorites]

(also whoops, surlyben actually noted this a few posts before mine, my bad!)
posted by chrominance at 10:00 PM on September 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's ridiculously easy to design a font now.
That is true and evidenced by the huge number of offerings out there, but a GOOD font. Which works on a multitude of modern devices large and small, which works well on screen or an eReader or a tablet held sideways or when printed on paper and works with every one of the gazillion unicode characters we have now, that is difficult.

The Monotype sprawling head office and factory in the 1940s-1970s and the rebuilt tiny modern office in the same location today.

Previously on Hoefler & Frere-Jones
posted by Lanark at 2:00 AM on September 3, 2023 [7 favorites]

brb spinning up a font-designing LLM*

*Large Ligature Model
posted by glonous keming at 7:18 PM on

I don't think it gets any more eponysterical than this!
posted by chavenet at 2:14 AM on September 3, 2023 [15 favorites]

It's ridiculously easy to design a font now.

This is like saying "it's ridiculously easy to record a song now".

In one sense, that's true: anyone with a laptop, a creative urge, a modicum of cleverness, and some time to kill can create a song or a font, and put it out into the world.

But creating a good song (or font) requires the kind of discernment that comes from years of practice and experience.

And you only get that if people are able apply themselves to the craft full-time – i.e., if they're paid enough.

Here are the kind of fonts you get from enthusiastic amateurs. Note that the vast majority of them are display fonts – and the vast majority of those are sort of whimsical and comic-bookish. (Not that there's anything wrong with that – but they're of limited value to the graphic designers who use fonts.)

Sometimes the preview images look OK – but if you type some sample text with them, you'll often find that the kerning is all wrong. They're often missing glyphs, such as diacritics and punctuation (some don't even have lowercase). The italic and bold versions (if they even have them) are usually auto-generated from the regular version, rather than designed by hand – which looks horrible. They rarely come in more than two weights (regular and bold). They often don't align well with other fonts. Et cetera.

Don't get me wrong: a few of them seem usable, if you don't mind a certain amateurish charm. And I don't mean to disparage the effort that these enthusiastic amateurs have put into their creations. Every great type designer (or musician, or what-have-you) started out as an enthusiastic amateurs.

But these fonts are not, in any sense, comparable to the fonts you get from a professional foundry.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 4:03 AM on September 3, 2023 [14 favorites]

honestly just about the worst thing you can do to someone is to teach them to recognize the difference between Arial and Helvetica

And kerning.

I've shared this one with graphic arts friends (and at least once before on Metafilter). I understand Munroe's wife is a graphic artist, so this seems a joke about how she's made his life worse.
posted by rochrobbb at 4:07 AM on September 3, 2023 [7 favorites]

I have to take this opportunity to plug the Monument Lettering Center. They research and document the history of gravestone typography in North America, and they offer a selection of gorgeous commercial fonts based on various historical lettering styles. (Perfect for Halloween!)
posted by escape from the potato planet at 4:08 AM on September 3, 2023 [11 favorites]

I've shared this one with graphic arts friends (and at least once before on Metafilter). I understand Munroe's wife is a graphic artist, so this seems a joke about how she's made his life worse.

Speaking as a longtime graphic artist who started working with type back when metal was still a common tool and one had to learn to navigate the california job case, public signage has become a horror show, and I often feel like that character from a movie, where only they can see the alien monsters among us. It literally does make going out in public kind of a less-than-enjoyable activity.

The latest trend I’ve noticed is artificially-condensed type. Where someone set some type, then used a negative horizontal scale on it to make it fit the width of the sign. And, it seems to be done with typefaces I know good-and-well come in true condensed versions. And most of them are things like municipal street signs. Did you know there are actual national type standards for things like speed limit signs? There are! Yet, apparently, some city sign shops don’t seem to give a fuck, and it’s stunningly obvious when you encounter a street sign not made to standards.

There a very exclusive, very expensive, suburban community nearby. One of those neighborhoods where the homes cost more than your lifetime earnings, and they name the place after all the trees they bulldozed to build the place. All this to say, it reeks of money and prestige. Unless you design with type and see the big stone edifice at the entryway, with the name of the neighborhood expertly chiseled across it. Well, “expertly” except for the severely artificially-condensed serif typeface they used. All you can do is shake your head and laugh at the message shitty typography sends, and you’re the only person who sees it or cares.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:54 AM on September 3, 2023 [15 favorites]

You say font, I say typeface. Let's call the whole thing off.
posted by blue_beetle at 7:10 AM on September 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

If artists aren't fairly compensated, you won't get more art

I want more novels, more songs, more poems, more pictures. More fonts? Honestly, not so much.
posted by Phanx at 9:34 AM on September 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

This does seem like a situation where, outside of marketing, the workspace is essentially feature complete. A place where 10-20 million in annual government funding could keep a country in whatever new fonts (released to the public domain) were needed. To the net betterment of everyone but foundry owners. Especially combined with the fonts released by other countries.
posted by Mitheral at 11:39 AM on September 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

Typography is not my profession but I am confident there remains plenty of work for skilled designers to do. If it were just about choosing fonts to catch the eye in an English language newspaper advertisement I might be more sympathetic to “aren’t there enough fonts?” but it isn’t just about that.

The Roman alphabet is used by many languages with unique letters and diacritics and punctuation — there’s more to design and refine than you may think, things that are simply beyond the scope of most hobbyist fonts. The use and importance of specific symbols is subject to change, and sometimes we need to handle new ones. Typographic conventions for numerals have evolved, and vary by context; I’m sure the same is true of the typography in musical scores, maps, and other specialized applications. We keep learning more about the impact of typography on neurodiverse readers, and we’ll continue to learn to do better. We read on e-ink screens, tablets, dashboard displays, and augmented reality displays, and the list is likely to keep evolving. And there are a lot more alphabets and writing systems beyond the Roman alphabet.

I hope we continue to have highly skilled, creative, problem-solving type designers indefinitely, and I hope they can make a good living.
posted by Songdog at 2:51 PM on September 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

Monotype even knew how to do a form of DRM back in the hot metal days.

The key to a Monotype caster (an unruly mess of a thing that combines electricity, compressed air and molten metal and yet somehow remains working) is a thing called a matrix case. This was a small cast-iron frame that held the individual bronze letter moulds. If you had the mat case, you had the font, pretty much: they were the TTFs of their day.

But Monotype got worried that someone might buy fonts in one country and use them in another, circumventing local price control (aka excess profits). So they made the casting attachment into which that mat case fitted a slightly different size for the UK and North America. One won't accurately fit into the other, and anyway, would you risk squirting liquid metal into something with an imprecise seal? While the attachment can be changed between standards, it takes a full shutdown and strip down of the caster. Which would probably have to be done by a Monotype-employed service tech, who was very likely forbidden to do such a thing.

Which is why my lovely matrix case of a bespoke typeface used by a major publisher in the UK languishes unusable in a Monotype-equipped print shop here in Canada ...
posted by scruss at 4:49 PM on September 3, 2023 [5 favorites]

I hope we continue to have highly skilled, creative, problem-solving type designers indefinitely, and I hope they can make a good living.

I agree completely. I'd just rather see those people make a good living in a way that doesn't exist at the whims of a private equity monopoly cause that rarely works out well for the public or the employees or contractors.
posted by Mitheral at 5:51 PM on September 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

The retooled Monotype saw its annual revenues climb from $107m in 2010 to $247m in 2018 and became a powerhouse [..] In 2019, private equity firm HGGC bought Monotype for $825m, acquiring its roster of typefaces and setting it up for even more acquisitions.

If only a fraction of those millions could have gone to support the Type Archive, which housed the historic archive and plant of the Monotype Corporation. The Type Archive ran out of money and closed in 2022.
posted by verstegan at 7:59 PM on September 10, 2023 [1 favorite]