Started in a basement in 2010, Fontspring has sought to improve the font industry, both by simplifying complicated font licensing and by highlighting talented independent foundries. After a decade of growth and refinement, we’re ready to take the next step for our business in order to bring high quality fonts to more people. 

Teaming up with Dribbble lets us realize the dreams we’ve had for years. We’re joining a team that cares about rewarding talented designers and brings new users into the font world. We’re excited to add our knowledge of font licensing and a focus on high quality fonts to that mix. Since they acquired Creative Market in 2020, we’ve watched Dribbble create more opportunities for designers and creators by bringing their communities together. We’re excited to further that mission through the addition of Fontspring.

That said, we’re still the exact same people working on the same team. You probably won’t notice many changes at all for a while. We’re going to keep doing what we’ve been doing, offering high quality support and attention to every customer, big or small. You’ll still get the same person on the phone when you call and get the same quality fonts with simple, perpetual licensing. 

Beyond that, we’re excited to see where we can take Fontspring with the support and backing of Dribbble. We believe in the good we’ve accomplished in this industry and can’t wait for our next steps in the years to come. We hope you’ll come along with us.

Twelve years ago, Fontspring launched with the idea for a font marketplace that was fair and equitable to both customers and foundries. Looking back, I think we succeeded in that mission. But, we hit a ceiling in the past few years in our ability to grow and further our mission. Dribbble’s partnership will give us the tools, resources, and strategic help needed to grow foundry revenue and continue innovating and creating value for our customers.

– Ethan Dunham
Founder, Fontspring

Dave Addey’s superior knowledge of fonts, keen eye for detail, and sharp wit make him an engaging narrator. With this much content, it could easily feel dry and stale. Fortunately, Addey has a delightful sense of self-aware humor throughout the book.

“Indeed, Eurostile has become so effective at establishing a time frame in the future that whenever I see the typeface in real life . . . I assume I’ve been transported to some futuristic dystopia in which a nursing home is really a sinister government facility for scientific experimentation.”

– Dave Addey, Typeset in the Future

Over the course of nine chapters, Addey takes the reader on a journey through 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner: The Final Cut, Total Recall, WALL·E, and Moon. Addey’s dives are extremely deep, and oftentimes veer off of typography and explore details like set design and other visual nuggets. His examination of iconography in Alien, retro sponsor logos in 2001, Letraset usage in Blade Runner, and a breakdown of the interpunct in WALL·E are just a few examples of his fascinating rabbit trails. Any film nerd is sure to get sucked into these tractor-beams.

It should be noted that Addey also includes references to many other movies aside from those mentioned above. These sidebars are a worthwhile digression, but they make me wish the scope of this book was broader. Addey recently tweeted that he will be adding more films to his blog. Back to the Future Part II, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, and Pixar’s upcoming Lightyear seem ripe for dissection, just off the top of my head. An in-depth look at the Star Wars franchise would also be welcome (despite being set “a long time ago” as the famous opening text reminds us).

The exclusive interviews are perhaps the highlight of the book for me. To read firsthand from iconic filmmakers about their design choices is well worth the price of admission. Addey interviews Paul Verhoeven (director of Total Recall), Stephen Coles (author of The Anatomy of Type), Ralph Eggleston and Craig Foster (designers at Pixar), to name a few.

My main critique of this book is its layout and design. What makes for great content on the blog does not always translate well to the printed page. Full-page spreads are few and far between, and some details have gotten lost in the small images. The “enhance button” trope would be a great help with the size of these screenshots. There are also many pages with white text on a dark background which often left me with a headache. I found myself preferring to read this content on the screen instead, for a smoother and more interactive experience. Dark mode is fine on a computer screen, but not so great in a book with a lot of text.

Despite this complaint, there’s a lot to love about Typeset in the Future, and I hope to read more from Dave Addey in the not-too-distant future. With the holiday season just around the corner, this could potentially hit all the right notes for that type-loving sci-fi geek in your life. If you’re already a big fan of the blog, this is a fantastic collector’s item to have on your shelf, and contains some fun bonus content. However, if you’re solely interested in the reading experience, you may want to begin with the blog that started it all. You can order a copy of the book there at typesetinthefuture.com/book.

. . .

What are your thoughts?

It takes a special kind of person to dive this deep into design. Typography is already a niche thing, and when you add science fiction into the mix, Typeset in the Future has a very particular demographic. If this type of book is up your alley, we’d love to hear your thoughts. Have you given this a read? What movies would you like to see Dave Addey dive into next? What other books would you like to see us review? Leave your comments below.

If you haven’t already, please do yourself a favor and read Jessica Hische’s first picture book, Tomorrow I’ll Be Brave. You can check out my review of it here on the Fontspring blog. It goes without saying that its sequel, Tomorrow I’ll Be Kind, belongs on your shelf as well if you’re already a fan.

Maybe an owl with Ziggy Stardust makeup or a snake with a noisemaker will bring a smile to your face. But if you’re not into cozy woodland critters, perhaps Hische’s embellished lettering work will melt your cold heart. It is, after all, the reason I’m writing this review on a font blog. Helpfulness, Patience, Gentleness, Honesty, Generosity, Gratitude, and Kindness are the illuminated pillars of this cozy visual poem.

For context, this book was released in 2020 – a time when kindness was much needed, and the art of being a neighbor tossed aside for personal comfort. Its message could not have hit at a more poignant moment. “Thinking of what others need – I’ll show tenderness to all.” The Golden Rule is regarded as the most universal ethical belief, but it is also easily forgotten. Whereas Brave was introspective, Kind focuses on outward actions (Likewise, the book’s warm color palette reflects this.)

The sentiment doesn’t end there. We see how small sparks of kindness touch those around us. Though we aren’t perfect, we shouldn’t let perfection get in the way of good. As an artist, I’m reminding myself of this on a daily basis. How often do we not share our imperfect gifts with others, when they could be sparks that inspire something bigger and better?

Tomorrow I’ll Be Kind reminds us that there is ability in vulnerability, there is leadership in servanthood, and there is beauty in empathy.

Hische’s companion book, Brave, Kind, and Grateful: A Daily Gratitude Journal, will be available this coming fall (November 23, 2021). It’s perfect timing for a thoughtful holiday gift, or to start the new year off with a grateful mindset. You can see more of Jessica Hische’s work on her website, jessicahische.is.

FontPeople was founded three years ago by Jason Harcombe, who was gracious enough to answer a few questions for us about his work.

FS: How did “FontPeople” originate?

JH: FontPeople was born out of wanting to enable people to work with type in a low-cost, simple way, which is why Fontspring are perfect partners. For us it’s about dealing with people, not software (hence the name) and enabling the creative process with low-cost, simple licensing.

FS: How would you describe your style?

JH: Relaxed. There’s so much red tape around intellectual property nowadays and in some cases rightly so. But we’re easy to deal with, we want to encourage trialing type with no commitment and then make the licensing of our fonts as frictionless as possible. In terms of the typefaces we produce, our “wheelhouse” is branding, corporate, display and text typefaces. We’re not so much with the scripts and handwriting.

FS: How has being a Fontspring foundry benefitted you?

JH: Exposure and great support mainly. The platform as a vendor is seamless and simple, and the reporting is excellent. The people are so nice and great to deal with.

FS: If you had to pick a favorite, which of your font families would you choose?

JH: Wow – what a question! I have four favorites and each time I see one of those four it’s that one. I flick between Leyendo, Cerco, Billie and Chewie. I guess I have to go for Billie as it’s named after my daughter. Though my dog (Chewie) will be upset.

FS: What have been the highlights of your career?

JH: Getting FontPeople off the ground with a laptop and a mobile phone in a converted garden shed. We’ve managed to build 20 premium families in under 2 years and will only continue to grow from strength to strength whilst working with and employing some fantastic talent. I have to say being mentored by people like Peter Rosenfeld (URW) and taking guidance from Gerry Leonidas (University of Reading) have been an absolute pleasure.

FS: What brands have you designed custom fonts for?

JH: Lähitapiola was a nice project. We worked with another Fontspring vendor, Kostas Bartsokas, to deliver a beautiful corporate typeface to one of the largest banks in Finland.

FS: What non-typographic things do you get inspiration from?

JH: We’re inspired by the world around us. Our fonts are personal to me. They all bear a name with meaning, like Billie (my daughter), Ozzie (my son), Zabal (the town where my grandparents met) or Chewie, my dog. The aim is to have a font named after everything important to me, though I think we’ll stop at 50. I’m also a big football (soccer) fan. Spurs, for all the pain they cause me, have been my team for 40 years now and my mission is to do a custom typeface for them one day.

FS: What advice do you have for someone starting out in the type industry?

JH: Keep it simple. Not to sound too much like Yoda, but complication leads to infringement, infringement leads to confrontation, confrontation leads to resentment. If you’re easy to work with, you don’t have any of that.

FS: Lastly, are there any font styles you haven’t tackled yet that you’re interested in trying?

JH: A cursive script with varying weights and levels of distress is on the agenda. We’ve commissioned one, so watch this space. It’s not a specialty of ours internally so we’re working with a partner on it. That’s what I love about this game – you can be competitors one minute and end up working together the next.

Be sure to take advantage of FontPeople’s full-library sale while you can! It lasts until July 6th. You can view FontPeople’s entire Fontspring catalog here.

For those unfamiliar with the name, Fenotype is designer Emil Bertell’s Finland-based design company. You’ve seen many of his font families featured in our Best of Fontspring lists over the past few years:

Best of 2017: Karu, Letterpress Studio, Roster
Best of 2018: Double Porter (voted a Top-Tier Typeface)
Best of 2019: Morison (voted a Top-Tier Typeface), Agile Sans, Fabrica, Hops & Barley, Zeit

We took some time to ask Emil a few questions about his work, to commemorate the decade-long partnership of Fenotype and Fontspring.

FS: What’s the origin of the name “Fenotype”?

EB: I liked the meaning of “Phenotype”: (the set of observable characteristics of an individual resulting from the interaction of its genotype with the environment) … Plus it has “type” in it. I also toyed with the idea of “Fennotype” as for Finnish-type but it felt too complicated and doesn’t look as good with the double n.

FS: How would you describe your style?

EB: Synthetic script with the idea of embracing the possibilities of vector design while trying to maintain the freedom of hand lettering (as much as possible).

FS: What inspired you to start designing your own fonts?

EB: I became aware of the concept of graphic design in high school. I attended an art-oriented school and we did coding, animation and graphic design. I had to design a calendar and I started to think about the huge impact that a typeface has in design, so I ended up creating my first typeface at the age of 16. The font wasn’t that brilliant though.

FS: If you had to pick a favorite, which of your font families would you choose?

EB: Grand Atlantic, Slacker, Vodka, and Praktika to name a few.

FS: What have been the highlights of your typographic career?

EB: As for visibility, the biggest one is most likely the “neon” typeface that users can utilize in Instagram Stories, that’s Cosmopolitan by me. Another really nice thing is that some years ago, Moomin Characters asked me to realize a script typeface based on the hand lettering of Tove Jansson, the author and creator of the Moomins. So that’s kind of a big deal here in Finland and probably in Japan too.

FS: What have you learned in your ten years that you wish you had learned sooner?

EB: First, I wish I’d stayed on my path with fonts from the beginning. I wish I had taken the time to learn drawing letters by hand earlier. That’s proven very useful skill when designing typefaces.

FS: What other non-typographic things are you inspired by?

EB: Three years ago I re-found skateboarding after 17 years of break. I like cooking. During the lockdown I’ve learned to cook some even more ambitious dishes.

FS: Can you tell us a bit about your illustration work?

EB: In 2007 I was studying at the University of Art & Industrial Design and I joined the freshly founded illustration agency, Agent Pekka. I drew realistic pencil-drawn illustrations coloured in Photoshop and it was a rather painstaking effort. I worked as a full time illustrator for 4 years drawing day and night, illustrating for advertising agencies and magazines. I even won the Mikkeli Illustration Triennial (a Finnish illustration competition). When my daughter was born I shifted my focus towards type design because illustrating was so exhausting.

FS: What does your type design process look like?

EB: There are many ways to design a type family. Sometimes I sketch with pen and paper, and sometimes with Procreate, but often I just start drawing letter shapes in Illustrator.

EB: When working on a script font, I usually start with lowercase a. I might spend quite a lot of time on the first letter, and then expand it to h, r, s, and so on. Once I’m happy with the first 6-10 letters, the rest of the lowercase comes easier. Many times I work on the lowercase for quite a while before even concerning myself about uppercase, so I might have plenty of contextual alternates and ligatures in lowercase before even drawing my first uppercase letter.

EB: When I’ve got the lowercase and uppercase done and working, I design punctuation and usually I need to have a complete working font before I design any extras, swashes, titling alternates, and so on. During this step, I export the font continuously and test it with long texts. When I’ve got the whole font working, I test the font in several languages.

EB: Then when I have the font set ready, I start working on the release. I usually start with the posters. The font family might sometimes surprise me. If it doesn’t look as good to me as I had intended, I try something different until I find a visual angle or concept where the font family looks to fit naturally.

EB: As the font designing is somewhat monotonous work and very little communication with the outside world, I sometimes spend extra time on the posters, to get a change in my work and also to keep my illustration and graphic design skills in shape. It’s also way more fun and often more quickly rewarding than working on a font (which takes weeks). Poster design is also important as a part of the font testing. A lot of times, I come up with the name and add some extra little features while designing the posters.

Be sure to take advantage of Fenotype’s foundry-wide sale while you can! The sale lasts until November 26th. You can view his entire catalog here.

flourish /ˈflər-ish/ [v.]  1. to grow luxuriantly
2. to achieve success
3. to make bold and sweeping gestures

I confess I’m a grown man and I love picture books. I’ve been building up my library of children’s books since… well, since I was a child. Maybe it’s the large illustrations or the sense of nostalgia, but something always beckons me to browse the kids’ section of my local bookstore. My 3-year-old son and I have fallen in love with the erratic scribblings of Oliver Jeffers, the warm elegance of Carson Ellis, and the understated humor of Jon Klassen. With her first children’s book, Jessica Hische offers a brand new entry to display on our shelf of favorite picture books.

If the name Jessica Hische doesn’t ring any bells for you, I recommend Googling her work or checking out her Instagram feed. Hische has made a living as a master of hand-lettering. With a whimsical love for the written word and clients that include Penguin Books, Tiffany & Co., and Wes Anderson, it should go without saying that Jessica’s work is top-notch. Her playful style and bold use of color feel right at home in the context of a children’s hardcover.

At face value, Tomorrow I’ll Be Brave is an inspirational poem with hand lettering interspersed. A nameless rabbit and cat guide us through the pages and add to the overall cuteness factor but the true main characters here (no pun intended) are the words themselves. The embellished adjectives and highlighted verbs that Jessica has chosen are powerful. They encourage young readers to dream big, explore the world around them, learn new skills, ask “why” a million times, and take pride in doing their best.

These are lessons that apply to not just children but also to anyone seeking to improve their craft. There is freedom in being okay with not reaching your goals. There is grace in realizing that success is not achieved by being the best at what you do, but by doing what you love. There is hope in realizing that tomorrow is a new opportunity to achieve bigger and better things. Whether you’re a grown-up lover of typography or have a creative child who is always asking “why”, Tomorrow I’ll Be Brave is a poignant and poetic mission statement for flourishing artists of all ages.

Jessica Hische seems to be having the time of her life doing what she loves, and naturally fills the role of children’s author in addition to lettering artist. Tomorrow I’ll Be Brave is as much a love letter to lettering as it is an ode to childlike wonder. I hope we will see more picture books like this from Jessica in the near future. In the meantime, due to her prolific nature and strong social media presence, I look forward to whatever new surprises she has in store.

The benefits

There are obvious benefits. If you’re already paying for Creative Cloud, you can try out a ton of new fonts without having to pay for each one individually. Adobe Fonts offers quite a few excellent typefaces from foundries like Font Bureau, Monotype, and Frere-Jones that are not currently available through Fontspring, as well as plenty that you’ll find on our site. Take advantage of this opportunity to explore some new fonts. Adobe is a reputable company with a strong history of quality design, and they’re no stranger to the world of type (many of Adobe’s own font families like Acumin Pro and Myriad Pro are consistently at the top of our best-sellers list). Their licensing is fair, and if you’re designing for print or on the web, you’ll find that a lot of your bases are covered.

So what’s the catch?

The luxurious pool you’re swimming in is not your own. Think of these fonts as rentals. If a foundry decides to remove a font from Adobe Fonts, or if you decide to turn off your CC subscription, then you no longer have access to those fonts. That doesn’t mean you need to delete designs you’ve already made using the fonts, but it does mean you can’t make any new ones. If your brand relies on the use of a specific font, you should definitely consider a perpetual license in order to have complete peace of mind. Likewise, if you go a while without using Creative Cloud or the fonts offered in the subscription, you still pay the same monthly fee, which adds up over time. Yes, 14,000 fonts is a lot. Those fonts may or may not overlap with Fontspring’s growing library of 69,000 fonts in 14,000 families (with more being added every day). If you’re looking to dive a little deeper than desktop and web use, with more customization options and a wider variety of fonts to explore, it’s time to venture beyond a swimming pool membership. The great “spring of fonts” awaits.

What can Fontspring offer that Adobe Fonts can’t?

We’re here to help you find fonts that are worth purchasing in the long-run. We highlight the best new fonts, best-sellers, and deepest discounts. We offer search tools like the Matcherator to help you find what you’re looking for. We have a great customer support team ready to talk to you whenever you need help using your fonts or if you need customized options. Our web fonts are all self-hosted, so they don’t depend solely on a third-party host or require tracking scripts, giving you more control. We also offer custom licensing, allowing you to embed fonts within apps, include them with design programs and product creation platforms, purchase extended rights for your entire organization, and more (none of which are allowed by Adobe Fonts). Most importantly, when you purchase a perpetual license through Fontspring, it’s a one-time payment, and that’s all. No hidden fees, no tracking, no subscriptions to manage, just one payment to make sure you’re covered for good.

Why not both?

With those details in mind, we should note that you don’t have to choose between purchasing font licenses individually or using a convenient subscription service. You can, in fact, have your cake and eat it too. I subscribe to Netflix, but I still purchase physical copies of my favorite movies (call me old fashioned). I subscribe to Spotify, but I continue to purchase my favorite albums. The two are not mutually exclusive. As a wise little girl on a taco commercial once said, “¿Por qué no los dos?” (“Why not both?”). Many Fontspring customers are already benefiting from Adobe Fonts, and that’s great. If you fall in love with a typeface you discover through Adobe Fonts, try it out and see if it’s worth adding to your personal library. If so, consider purchasing a perpetual license from Fontspring. Over time, you’ll be able to expand your personal library and never have to worry about ownership. After all, here at Fontspring, we’re all about keeping you worry-free.

Flow

Words are meant to be read. An awkward overlap of letterforms can often look clunky and distracting. When necessary, using OpenType alternates and appropriate ligatures is a great way to guarantee a fluid read.

Font used: Proprietor Roman

Clarity

When our eyes see “9 3/4”, the voice in our head might immediately say “ninety-three” before feeling silly and realizing it’s obviously “nine and three quarters!”. Save your reader a little bit of mental energy by using OpenType formatted fractions whenever applicable.

Font used: Brandon Text

Balance

An unbalanced word in a title or logo can often look boring and empty. Use OpenType swashes and flourishes to balance and frame your work by filling in any looming empty space above or below a word. Be careful to not go overboard with this technique as too many overlapping strokes could start to look cluttered.

Font used: Proprietor Script

Unity & Harmony

OpenType features also help us keep things consistent. Are you using all caps or small caps? Use the appropriate numeral style to keep everything on the same visual level. Old style numerals are best paired with mixed caps to line up with ascenders and descenders.

Font used: Landa

Beauty

Though readability is very important, we want our work to be more than just “legible”. We want it to look beautiful. Swashes, alternates, ornaments, and flourishes help to make work look finished and customized. When using brush scripts or hand display fonts, don’t shy away from OpenType alternates and swashes on repeated letterforms to make your designs look more authentic.

Font used: Viva Beautiful Pro

Of course, there are many more ways to implement OpenType features in your designs. If you’re new to the world of OpenType and need a quick overview of what it is and how to access these features in your programs, check out our OpenType 101 article and brief video tutorials.

Photoshop OpenType tutorial:

Illustrator OpenType tutorial:

InDesign OpenType tutorial:

If you need help with these features, feel free to email support@fontspring.com and our team will be happy to point you in the right direction!

The Golden Secrets of Lettering is not about fonts or calligraphy, a distinction Martina Flor makes clear in the first chapter. She chooses instead to offer a look behind-the-scenes of hand-crafted lettering (a set of words where each individual letter is drawn from scratch and designed for a limited use to tell a cohesive story). Nevertheless, the topic of attractive letterforms is one that resonates here at Fontspring. Flor focuses on six basic guidelines: consistency, detail, one-of-a-kind, storytelling, good letter shapes, and creating something new. These ideals are stressed in the text and also evident in the physical book itself.

Golden Secrets reads somewhat like Harry Potter’s potion textbook from the Half-Blood Prince, with helpful handwritten hints and doodles in the margins for aspiring type wizards. Martina Flor bestows her vast knowledge to the reader in an encouraging tone as if she were sharing her secrets to success with a friend. Her contagious passion for lettering overflows into every corner of the book.

Chapters one through five cover the basics and terminology of letters while chapters six through ten are more hands-on, for those seeking to improve their craft or get a foot in the door. Even for the typographic aficionado, there’s quite a bit of gold to be mined here. When covering the basics, she points out valuable nuggets like specific details of optical adjustment, when to implement an overshoot, and the difference between the size of a period vs. ellipses.

Every page is visually engaging and a delight to read from cover to cover. It’s also a quick read since Martina gets right to the key points with very little filler. This adds to its shelf-life, as you won’t mind coming back to it from time to time when you need inspiration or a refresher on basic type guidelines. Her handwritten notes often encourage the reader to think outside of the box, for instance, “How many ways can you draw a lowercase f?”

William Morris once said, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” Martina Flor’s The Golden Secrets of Lettering is both beautiful and useful. You’ll want to keep it handy on your shelf so you can pull it out for reference. Just make sure to give it a good spot where you can still gaze upon the cover when it’s not in use.

When you purchase a font, you are not actually buying the font itself, you are buying a font license. And a font license is often long and full of lawyer-language that is dense and hard to read. Sometimes, embedded in the license, are restrictions that most would consider atypical. These clauses often put difficult, onerous demands on designers, that if ignored could lead to license violations and expose you to potential legal action.

Thankfully, the bulk of font licenses you find on Fontspring are tame and common-sense. You will find that normal, every-day use, even in a busy agency, never brings you out of compliance with these licenses. Fontspring has always, from the beginning, held firmly to the idea of clear, common-sense licensing. It is the primary foundation on which our business rests. We go so far as to call ourselves “Worry-Free” and mean it. We want you to come here and know that you will not be put in a difficult licensing situation. And yet to accommodate all font designers, and offer the fullest breadth of type we can, we sometimes need to bend what we allow on our site. Those two ideas of being worry-free, and accommodating don’t always mix well.

Installation Restrictions

For example, many fonts in the past were licensed based on the number of CPUs. In today’s world where every device has multiple CPUs, including your phone, this kind of language is impossible to stay in compliance with. Here is Emigre’s restriction from 1996:

Each Emigre Font purchase is licensed for use on a single printer or output device in conjunction with a maximum of 5 CPUs at one location. This means that your customer can install the fonts on up to five CPUs for use with one output device, such as a laser printer.

An output device is any printer, such as a Linotronic rasterizer, laser printer, or dot-matrix printer, any video display terminal or any other device where display is generated from the font software outlines, such as with the use of Adobe Type Manager, or if the font is to be used primarily for display terminals that generate the output, as in multimedia CD.

Emigre nowadays has more sensible licensing:

The Emigre Font Software is licensed for use at one (1) location with a maximum of five (5) devices.

And yet some current licenses still retain similar language that would be impossible to be compliant with.

End-Use Restrictions

New end-use limits have been growing in popularity, which we find troubling. Specifically, some licenses are trying to restrict the particular context a typeface can be used. This includes things like broadcast television, logo design and merchandise.

To us, it is common sense that if you can produce artwork on a desktop computer in a raster format, it doesn’t matter where it shows up, or how often. The font has become part of a larger work, and no longer is its own “thing”.

Impression Restrictions

Another restriction we find burdensome is the limiting of the number of impressions the font can be used. For instance if you were to design a collateral system using an impressions-restricted font, you could only print a certain quantity before you would be required to pay more money. This limit is often set to 250,000. As soon as you print 250,001, you trigger the clause and will need to upgrade your license.

We find this particularly bad, since most designers buy fonts and hold them for many years. The same font could be used on many different products and campaigns, often without knowledge of it’s impression restriction. And be careful with anything online. Consider a Facebook image that goes “viral.” Those impressions count too, somehow.

Note that some competitor distributors include this kind of clause in their default license. Be on the lookout.

Content Restrictions

This one, thankfully is most rare, and has typically only appeared in freeware and shareware licenses. But we’ve seen instances where the license singles out particular political, religious and civic topics that cannot be the basis for a design using the fonts. How will a designer know, or keep track of which fonts cannot be used for what content? This, like the quantity limits are an unreasonable demand on designers.

Fontspring’s Solution

We have taken it on ourselves to read every single license from every single foundry. That wore us out, as you can imagine. But after a good nights sleep, we took this knowledge to our website and made three changes:

1. Worry-Free Seal of Approval

First, we separated all the licenses into two piles, one we call “Worry-Free” and the second pile we call “With Caution”. All licenses that pass our Worry-Free test receive a badge that indicates that the license is unaffected by these extra-ordinary clauses. Look for the badge in our listings in the blue bar under each family, as well as on the family page near the description.

2. License Flags

On each family page, you’ll see a list of the available licenses. Next to each will be a symbol that describes the “Worry-Free” status of that license. If a license is not Worry-Free, it will have a Caution icon along with a pop-up explanation of the restrictions.

3. License Highlights

Clicking on a license will now show the full license text and a brief, clear, obvious explanation of any restrictions in the license.

Armed with this knowledge, you will be able to navigate our site, buying fonts with confidence.

Have any questions? Any ideas on how we can bring even greater clarity to font licensing? Let us know in the comments.