Comment by gguncth
7 hours ago
The purpose of the brand font is to avoid paying licensing fees. Because the typefaces aren’t protected by copyright it’s usually enough to just have someone go and essentially clone an existing font. The whole thing is an artifact of peculiarities of IP law
My comment was not on why but what.
A brand is still free to commission a copy/clone of an 'interesting' font that has character (or, beware even serifs) ...
> The purpose of the brand font is to avoid paying licensing fees.
There are more than enough good fonts under OFL that it surprises me people want to commission a custom font primarily for licensing reasons rather than using a standard one.
Is that true, though? Wouldn't it be possible to just copy a font wholesale, since they are uncopyrightable? How would licensing fees be enforced?
I think modern fonts include hinting software and stuff like that.
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.
Brand fonts are typically a specific license by the original creator of the font, often together with some adjustments (e.g. big companies often need additions for global markets that were not in the smaller original font)