Skip to main content
Humanities LibreTexts

4.5: Font Availability and Ethics

  • Page ID
    50703
  • \( \newcommand{\vecs}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \) \( \newcommand{\vecd}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash {#1}}} \)\(\newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\) \( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\) \( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\) \( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\) \( \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \(\newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\) \( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\) \( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\) \( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\) \( \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\)\(\newcommand{\AA}{\unicode[.8,0]{x212B}}\)

    Font Availability and Ethics

    Having covered a great many aspects of font design, I want to finish with a very short discussion of font availability and ethics. As you start learning more about fonts and what fonts can do when used in different ways, you may become quite aware of the limits of your font choice in your default working environment. Generally speaking, this is governed by your operating system choice— Windows and Linux tend to have less font choices than OSX, likely due to the classical heritage of Macintosh computers as designer-friendly spaces. To get new fonts, you usually have to find and download them or buy.

    Font creation, like any other act of creation, is a lot of work. Font designers craft each and every individual character by hand and then go and create kerning for those designs and special characters and variations as well. There is a lot of work in this process, and just like any other creative professional they deserve compensation for their work. I say all of this to prepare you for a reality that you will encounter in any professional writing scenario: assets are not free, and many times they are not cheap for professional use.

    For example, a professionally designed font might cost $25 for a single license, but if you wanted to use it across multiple computers and with multiple devices, you would need to investigate a multiuse license. As we’ll discuss a bit later when we talk about project management and intellectual property issues in technical writing, professional materials require expenditures if you’re not going to create the assets you use yourself, and often the creation of those assets requires such a specialized skill set and equipment that your either have to hire someone internally or simply pay the fees associated with using the content you want. With that said, once you start thinking about all that can be done with $250 image for a logo and a $25 font, all of the money and interaction that comes from using these assets, the deal is quite reasonable.

    With that said, there is a thriving world of open source fonts available for use, much like this textbook is open-access and free for anyone to read and use. As with almost anything open source, things can be a bit wonky and slanted towards a particular usage. Open source content is usually created by folks with a particular ideological interest for open materials, folks that believe that open is best (I suppose I’m closer to this camp than any as you might be able to tell since I’m writing an open-access textbook), and folks that are using open source for a particular usage as part of an organized effort or passion project. There are other permutations of course, but these are two big camps. The end result is that the same idiosyncrasies that come with these mindsets carry over into the assets. Just be aware that open source doesn’t mean that you get the same breadth and depth of quality for free. It means that in certain cases you can get amazing content for free from passionate folks, and in other cases you get a good-enough effort that exists because it needs to.

    With that said, you need to be careful of what you’re getting into when you go looking for free or cheap fonts. There are individuals who will rather unscrupulously strip a high-end font and recreate it and release it open-source or as a low-end product to make a quick buck. These recreations aren’t going to be as high quality usually as the originals and they won’t reimburse the folks doing the amazing design and research work needed to create the font you’ve been eyeing. Be aware of these issues.

    Generally speaking, you’ll want to be able to trace any fonts or other assets that have a potential copyright back to their original holder, as we’ll be discussing later on. The way that business and professional writing works, if someone uses a copyrighted item to make money there can be severe penalties for lost profits and lots of lawsuits coming your way. When you’re working as part of a larger organization, they’ll get targeted because they likely have much more money than you and they’re the ones making the profit off the content that you appropriated without a license or permission.

    However, there are many fonts out there that designers will freely offer to you with freeware licenses—if you’re not going to be making money off the font, they’ll let you use it without issue. These licenses can be helpful for many personal projects that you may have, allowing you to create content without licenses designed around commercial use. I’ve used these types of licenses many times and as of late I’ve tended to use fonts created by a designer that I know through our mutual appreciation of comics. There is a wide world of folks creating fonts and I think you’ll find they are passionate and fascinating folks to work with.

    Section End Questions

    1. Take a risk with font personalities! Recreate your institution’s logo or wordmark with different fonts that have different personalities. What effects can you get? Why?
    2. Use tracking or kerning to alter the impact of a headline or wordmark. What happens when you introduce more space or less space?
    3. Do some original research—find a popular brand and breakdown their usage of fonts and spacing. What typefaces do they use? What fonts within those typefaces? What types of x-heights are used? How are kerning and tracking and leading used?
    4. Find a professionally designed font and research the process behind acquiring a license for it and the limitations of that license in professional usage.

    This page titled 4.5: Font Availability and Ethics is shared under a CC BY-SA license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Adam Rex Pope.

    • Was this article helpful?