Decades of Font Build-Up: License Issues

I've been "collecting" typefaces since the days when you could buy 5.25" diskettes with dozens of Bitstream*-compatible, PostScript, and other shareware faces for a couple of dollars. (It's more of a hoard than a collection...)  While a number of these have been jettisoned along the way for various reasons, a recent dive into the rabbit hole of "free" online font repositories (1001 Fonts, DA Font, etc.) suggests that I may still have a bunch of these either installed or in archived directories, without any attached license information. Since most cheap and free fonts in the 1990s were either bitmapped, poorly-designed, or cheap knockoffs of better-known faces, and most of us used those faces for personal, or small-distribution hard-copy newsletters, it was unusual for any of us to come to the negative attention of the rights owners (and even more unusual for the rights owners to do anything about it).

Times have changed. If I'm going to make a design "public" — either by putting an image of it (or a photograph of my finished product) on this blog, posting it to a design community (such as Behance, Dribble, or Design Bundles Community) or social medium (such as Pinterest), or allowing it to be searchable on Cricut Design Space — I have to mind my Ps, Qs, and alternate character sets, making sure that any resources I use are under the terms of the rights owner's license, and that I tag the designer, the rights owner, the place I found the resource, and (if a separate entity), the place from which I acquired the license.

This is not always as easy as it looks, and I don't always succeed at this part of my task. The proliferation of "old fonts" — both online and in my personal hoard — doesn't make it any easier.

Looking at the information on relatively recent faces on places like DA Fonts and 1001 Fonts state that those faces are "demo" versions of typefaces that the authors are currently selling on sites like Creative Fabrica and Creative Market. Great! I can play with the face, and if I need it for something beyond the free site's license, I can look up the face and license it appropriately.

Other faces have information on the brand-name foundry from which they came. While a handful of these faces are from current companies such as Adobe and Monotype, many more are from once-big names that have since been acquired by other big names (Bitstream was acquired by Monotype in 2012) or have ceased operation (such as Casady & Greene). So far, I've not been able to find the current owners of Casady & Greene's catalog.

The download page notices for many of the oldest fonts don't include any license information other than "contact the author" about licensing terms or license upgrades. Sometimes there is a link, sometimes a Readme file, and sometimes nothing at all. Unfortunately, a lot of contact information in these Readme files is out-of-date (questionable Compuserve addresses, defunct websites, etc.). Trying to contact those designers could require significant research on the user's part, as well as hoping that the license enquiry email would not be thrown out as spam.

DA Fonts, 1001 Fonts, and their ilk have been around for decades. Like me, I suspect they scraped up typefaces wherever they could find them, and have a back catalog of fonts and faces that they haven't had the time, manpower, or inclination to curate. Unfortunately that leaves them in the category of caveat emptor where type selection options for public-facing designs are concerned.

Obviously, we all have the option to not-use typefaces of questionable licensing when creating something we might want to post or sell. Personally, I need to take the time to curate my catalog and archive anything for which I don't have clear license information (or at least clear licensor information). And if you ever created shareware, donationware, or other freely-available type, you might want to check these "all the free fonts you can download" sites to make sure that anything of yours posted there has your current contact information and licensing terms.

Tagged by Cricut!

The typical Chanukah version of the "Ugly Christmas Sweater" includes a chanukiah (9-branched menorah), a Star of David, and/or a dreidel (4-sided top with Hebrew letters on each side). It is some combination of a near royal blue and white, echoing the colors of the Israeli flag (which in turn, echo the colors of a traditional tallith or prayer shawl, which themselves echo the Biblical command to wear a garment with fringes, and in each corner, a thread of a particular shade of blue — Num. XV:37-41). Gold, silver, or their equivalent tones of yellow and gray, may be added for contrast.

Let's just say I'm not typical. (Would a typical person wish you a "Boo Christmas"?)

While the game of dreidel is quite simple, it seems difficult to explain to someone for the first time. This is particularly true because the letters on the dreidel are generally written in Hebrew "print", and to a non-Hebrew reader, the nun (נ) can look very similar to the gimmel (ג). I decided to have some fun and print up a T-shirt with an irreverent set of instructions, and presented in the manner of Wiley Publishing's "For Dummies" series of books and e-books. I licensed a couple of dreidel images from Cricut (#M3BA72 and #M87F31EA), and because I didn't have the same typefaces as Wiley uses for their series (and hey, I didn't want to copy their cover page design exactly because that would be copyright infringement!), I used dafont's Kanisah Regular (for the word "Dreidel") and the installed version of Papyrus ("for Dummies") on the back, Google Fonts' Alegreya Sans Italic for the title on the front, and Arial Bold for the instructions themselves.

It was a fun project and basic enough to "share" on Design Space. Little did I know that Provo Crafts' blog authors thought it worthy of highlighting!

I was looking for Judaic-themed shirts recently, just to see what was around and get some ideas for what sells at what price points, and one of the links Google found was my "Dreidel for Dummies" in Cricut's "Holiday T-Shirt" blog.

I wish I'd found out about it earlier, but hey! Thanks, Cricut!

Creating an Alphabet - Ingress into Niantic's Glyphs

I'm not into geolocation games, but my housemates are. My Other Half is a recreational geocacher, has been active with Munzee, and is somewhere up in the difficult-to-reach levels of Ingress. My sister is a virtual Ingress addict. (Both play with the "Resistance" faction.)

As a non-participating tag-along to several events, I've finally decided I needed an appropriate T-shirt. I have a couple of designs ready to go for a "Geo Tag-Along" shirt.

My other geolocation design work has been firmly in the Ingress realm: a Resistance glyph (which looks like a number 4 with a tail) for the Other Half's car, along with a Resistance pocket polo that has the Resistance "key" logo. (The design is not shared on Design Space because the graphic I used is not mine, so I'm restricting the design to personal use.)

Playing around with Cricut's typefaces, "All Mixed Up" reminded me a lot of the calibration grid for Ingress's glyphs.

Cricut Typeface "All Mixed Up" copyright Provo Crafts International.

 I decided to try my hand at doing a multilayer alphabet based on that callibration grid.

The work required figuring the placement of the pips (holes), creating a complex path in Illustrator, then creating and inserting the line elements. Finally, the whole thing had to be imported into Design Space, where I welded the paths of the line segments and ditched the extraneous ones I used for editing.

Ingress Alphabet (.svg)

My character set is limited to unaccented Western letters, numerals, and a couple of marks one might expect to see in player names. I chose orange as a neutral working color. (Resistance players will be able to color the lines blue, while Enlightened players can change it to green.) Each letter and background is grouped, and will need to be ungrouped before changing colors. The current design does not have a white background, so you might need to add that as well.

Ingress players will notice a couple of things besides the weird orange color: some of the characters are identical to glyphs seen in the Glyphtionary. I've been able to change two from my original design, but my "I", "V", and asterisk still duplicate official Glyphs.

The Glyphs themselves are also available as cut files on my Cricut profile.