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Font agreements are messy
Don’t just read the pangram; read the fine print.
This instalment of Creative Monologue has some irony, as I raise the question about tinkering font agreements non-exploitatively. Unlike breaking design rules for innovation, how do we not break moral codes when it comes to font usage?
Back on the 8th of August last year, Leah Maldonado — a Portland-based Designer currently working for Nike — posted in her Instagram story of a vinyl album. It was the latest album by Leon Bridges, entitled “Gold-Diggers Sound.” She wasn’t pleased, not because of his music, but the typeface featured on the cover seemed close to what she had designed. This typeface in question was GlyphWorld Meadow, a part of a set of nine fonts that she finessed to emulate different landscapes of the natural world. It’s blobby, it’s rounded at the ends, it’s what Eye on Design has deemed trendy; what they call “Jugend-ish,” vis-à-vis the Jugendstil artistic movement that happened around the late 19th to the early 20th century.
Maldonado wondered if someone had “used a modified or knock-off version” of the font “without a commercial license” on that album cover. Upon some investigation, she found the designer of the typeface. By Tina Ibañez, Swoop is a font just as gloopy, round, and Jugend-ish as it can be. The thing is, although giving the same vibe, Swoop and Meadow are not exactly the same. The contours are different, the strokes at times don’t terminate the same way, the weights also vary.
Maldonado further mentioned in her story: “They called it a custom font. This is not how you make a custom font. Be very careful about modifying a font and producing an .otf from your modification. It’s illegal and you can get into trouble doing that.” According to Ibañez’s Instagram post on June 10, pictures of Swoop lettering are seemingly drawn on sheets of paper, like how a typographer may start a type specimen. This is not to say that no digital contour-editing of another font file is involved in this. But from these images, it is possible that Ibañez has drawn her typeface from scratch, or was inspired by a Jugend-ish typeface before drawing one of her own. But why does this matter?
