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0 pointsmatt40777y ago0 comments

A font family with the weights and other options a newspaper needs is a major undertaking. It's maybe 5 to 10 person-years of rather specialised work. For a publication constantly fighting to even break even, the costs aren't trivial.

So, the answer obviously is: the Guardian got the font far cheaper by allowing it to be sold to other customers, and (relevant here) not paying for a license that allows sub-licensing (which would be completely useless to them, anyway).

I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually a deal where no money changed hands, with the foundry getting the Guardian name for PR, and constant feedback during the design process.

As to web design: unless otherwise specified, web design is covered by the same copyright rules as fonts (or movies, or books,...). The correct analogy actually is a customer selling your design to some third party, something that probably would upset quite a few designers.

As for the customer changing a design: that's an infringement of the creator's so-called "moral rights". Its legality varies between jurisdictions, I believe.

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notavalleyman7y ago

> A font family with the weights and other options a newspaper needs is a major undertaking. It's maybe 5 to 10 person-years of rather specialised work

I'd love to hear more about this and why it's such an undertaking. Is it the "Font family" aspect that takes so long, because the designers are expected to produce a never ending line of similar fonts and symbols? Do the font designers have to consider printing costs ("if we make that exclamation mark one degree thicker, it'll use fifteen incremental litres of black ink per year")?

krsdcbl7y ago

For the lettershapes themselves it won't likely be a matter of "printed area", depending on the news paper it will be printed at a far lower dot grain density than your average print product.

There are although numerous things to consider when designing a font for small printed copy, like how tight you can make a corner before ink would start to trap in it and bleed over the detail.

But there are many aspects of creating a full font family that make it a huge amount of work - not only do you need to fit all supported characters to different weights, essentially re-drawing the glyphs for every weight to make them balanced within their shape. You'll also have to do the kerning, tweaking individual spacings for all possible letter combinations at every weight. And that is all after having created & perfected every shape of every glyph to work together and have a distinguishable look and fashion.

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