Member-only story

Font agreements are messy

Don’t just read the pangram; read the fine print.

Faux Icing
UX Collective
8 min readJan 22, 2022
An illustration featuring various objects and patterns, including mechanical pencils, flags, polka dots, lines and a folder icon with the letter ‘A’ on it.
No Medium membership? Read this article for free here.

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…

The author made this story available to Medium members only.
If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us.

Or, continue in mobile web

Already have an account? Sign in

Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Faux Icing

Freelance Graphic Designer, overthinker, and desires humour. fauxicing.carrd.co

No responses yet

What are your thoughts?