Related: https://eidosdesign.substack.com/p/why-every-brand-looks-the...
I was surprised to receive the DMCA (it is hosted on GitHub Pages). I ignored the emails because…I’m lazy.
They (GitHub) eventually took down the repository (and site). So I swapped to another font and I don’t think my wife noticed.
I think all of this was still easier than probably paying for the font!
Lesson of the story? Don’t underestimate the impact of laziness on your potential customers.
One of the major issues we had at my previous company weaning people off of powerpoint (to google docs) was brand fonts. Ours, of course.
A lot of what is considered brand identity in presentations comes from fonts, which makes Google Docs Slides a non-starter for many unfortunately.
(we ended up making them in powerpoint and using the Google Docs compatibility mode with pptx).
But as someone who has made multiple neutral sans families, I agree. The launch rhetoric about creating a differentiated visual identity is comical when you look at all the interchangeable corporate sans together.
<html> <body> <!--StartFragment--><meta charset='utf-8'><meta charset="utf-8"><b style="font-weight:normal;" id="docs-internal-guid-8b11d82e-1a25-4b6a-be64-ebdd55b2a698"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:22pt;font-family:'Facebook Sans',sans-serif;color:#000000;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;white-space:pre-wrap;">I just stole Facebook Sans</span></p></b><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><!--EndFragment--> </body> </html>
After all, gating by IP address? What happens if someone from the marketing team logs on from an airport? All of the slides revert to Arial?
> Google Workspace lets brands who pay enough embed custom corporate fonts into their docs and slides. Normally, these are locked to just those brands shelling out for custom typefaces, but there's one loophole: the ol' copy/paste. Below are a selection of brand fonts with which you can do exactly that. Enjoy.You can also just stick them in a font-editor and re-export "as your own font" with some minor tweaks. Not that you should, of course.
A brand is still free to commission a copy/clone of an 'interesting' font that has character (or, beware even serifs) ...
It's still an 80 billion dollar company in market cap, so there is that.
Also I'm guessing it's so they have another means of attack on knock off products that directly copy them.
Making a typeface takes a tremendous amount of work. The financial upside is extremely hard to justify.
I think non-designers underestimate the amount of effort required by an order of magnitude. I put it in the territory of building indie games. Potentially years of your life go into it, and it's a huge problem if everyone pirates your work.
So, I need to be super rich? Thats sad.
E.g. the Klarna Headline is pretty distinct, but I've never seen it before. The four other Klarna fonts are super generic. Also why do they need five different fonts?
Mostly I think these custom fonts are a waste of money. If you ship software that needs to include fonts, and you don't want to pay a license, it makes sense. If you do it because of "corporate identity" it seems pointless.
That said, a certain corporation's bought up a load of fonts made over the past x decades and is making a tidy sum selling old rope again and again without adding anything of value, or funding the original designers/converters, so I'm quite happy to illuminate how an individual can get around such things for use on their personal blog with an audience of ten, should they so wish.
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ed - you're also not as likely to be able to get a whole usable font from a small foundry in the first place, without buying it.
If you produced a bunch of screenshots of the output at various sizes, and then asked an LLM to convert to ttf or whatever, I’m guessing that’d be OK. I’m not an expert in this stuff though.
Then because your contract with Google is large enough to matter, they'll add your custom corporate branded fonts to your font dropdowns.
You can't copyright the alphabet.
>and it's a huge problem if everyone pirates your work.
I've never pirated a font. Not once have I boarded a ship in the middle of the ocean, gun in hand, taking the crew and cargo of typography hostage.
But more seriously, I acknowledge that it's a problem. It's just not my problem.
Where did things go this wrong?
You're not paying to use the alphabet, there are plenty of perfectly legible typefaces that are completely free for you to use.
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1. I would note that bitmap fonts do not receive the same protection as Type 1 or OTF fonts.
Yes, the EULA may prohibit modifications of local installations, but you’re not physically restricted from doing so - only contractually.
This isn’t much different; there still are plenty of non-Google options for creating presentations to choose from that do allow using your own font.
Never felt myself lacking for fonts in Docs, myself. Quite the opposite, Google Fonts has way more than I'd ever have preinstalled and is now my primary avenue for typeface discovery.
Granted, you now need to pay Microsoft a monthly fee for Powerpoint instead of a one-time-fee. But that is in large part because too many people preferred Google Docs, so Microsoft tried to become more like them
Are you building a slide deck on your systems architecture? Probably doesn't matter.
Are you building a marketing deck on your new corporate identity? Probably matters a lot.
Either way, the tool I'm using shouldn't be the one deciding what matters and what doesn't. Just let me use my font as I please!
Such companies should be mocked and shamed, not held up as examples to follow.