Typography: It’s a (Copyrighted) Art
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
It was with my burgeoning interest in design several years ago that I first became aware of the art of typography—how fonts are set in a design to appeal to readability, practicality, and aesthetic tastes. I’ve by no means since become a font aficionado, though I am something of a snob about choosing just the right font for my creative work.
There are those—typographers—who have made this their goal: to create just the right font for any situation. It is a true art. The intricacy of font work lends itself to a great deal of vision, patience, and mayhap a bit of oddity. (Check out “Being a Typographer” at CreativePro.com).
It is the same as any other unique image—and has just as much of a claim over copyright. But that fact is something we occasionally forget. ‘We’ being anyone from a personal user creating a poster for a band to a business creating a website for their product to, say, a very large company using the fonts for their ads.
Such was the case with NBC, which is currently facing a lawsuit from typographic firm The Font Bureau over a mishandling of font licensing. The Font Bureau, which is a big shot in the typographic world (having designed over 1,500 fonts for over 300 companies, according to their website), claims that NBC did not secure the rights to use a handful of fonts that appeared in their fall marketing campaign. A big mistake, as without proper licensing, all of that advertising can be pulled and would need to be redone. And that is an extremely expensive process.
Even large companies running intricate and expensive advertising campaigns make mistakes. But the fact of the matter is that, whether this or other incidents were purposeful or honest mistakes, people occasionally see a font as something they have an automatic right to—because it’s there, and it’s only text, and hey, who cares anyway? (more…)
Rushing a book to market without understanding all the consequences of your decision is about as bright as marrying someone you meet in Las Vegas after a fifteen-hour drinking binge. Even if the reasons behind the rush seem legitimate, beware of the beer-goggle effect—your book won’t look nearly as attractive when it comes off the press as it does in your head when you’re deciding to skip vital steps in the publication process. There are three areas where rushing will come back to haunt you with particular vengeance: 