Gotham inscription at the Freedom Tower
In the United States, Gotham has come to signify more than just change. You will find it on the inscription on the cornerstone laid for the new Freedom Tower at Ground Zero, and, despite its creator’s claims that Gotham is just Gotham, it has inherited loaded associations with victory and honest success. Those who keep a keen eye on the fontography of movie posters have noticed that Trajan and Gill Sans have found a serious rival when it comes to movies that have a shot at the Academy Awards. There are many other noteworthy and more exciting fonts in the Hoefler & Frere-Jones catalogue (not least Vitesse, Tungsten and their classic version of Didot), but only one that features on the posters of and that decorate their office: we have chosen to spell out our new age of austerity in Gotham.
And finally there is the ultimate tribute, that point when you know your typeface has really joined the pantheon of the greats. This is the point where people decide not to pay for it. A package of eight Gotham weights costs $199 for use in one computer, with reductions for more machines, so people have tried to counterfeit the look as best they can. It will always be cheaper to use the free fonts on your computer, as Tobias Frere-Jones discovered when he searched for Obama memorabilia on eBay. There were posters promoting the usual messages of and ‘Be The Change’, and they had familiar layout and colours. But they looked slightly wrong in Gill Sans and Lucida, and they only fooled some of the people some of the time.
In fact, Gotham had one more tribute to come, and it was not one that made Frere-Jones comfortable. At the end of 2010, several Tea Party hopefuls had come to favour Gotham as their typeface of choice, not least Sarah Palin, who used it extensively online. Whether this displays a paucity of imagination, a subtle form of wagon-jumping or an utterly cynical belief that a font really can win you an election (or perhaps all three) only future voters will decide.
In 1976, Max Miedinger, the original draughtsman of Helvetica, the world’s most familiar font, revealed that, like most type designers at that time, he received a set fee for his work, and failed to reap royalties. ‘Stempel earns a lot of money with it but I am out of the game,’ he said. ‘I feel cheated.’ The Swiss typographer died virtually penniless, four years later.
Stempel, Helvetica’s font foundry owner, has clearly made money from the font. But not perhaps as much as you might expect. Owning fonts is not as lucrative as, say, licensing Microsoft programs, for the simple reason that if your font is any good, it gets copied. And there is very little you can do about it. Helvetica clones have been available for decades, often with tiny modifications. Fonts such as Book and display similar attributes to ; one clone even calls itself But the biggest transgressor, in terms of global impact, is .
Arial is the Helvetica lookalike favoured by – you can probably guess this – Microsoft. In texts and documents, it has almost certainly seen more use than the original. Many people will prefer it to Helvetica, for it has a slightly softer and more rounded tone. Without actually mentioning Helvetica, Arial has always sold itself on these attributes, drawing attention to its fuller curves and angled terminals, and claiming it is less mechanical and industrial than other sans serifs. These ‘humanist’ characteristics ensured it was ‘more in tune with the mood of the last decades of the twentieth century’.
A remarkable thing about Arial is that it has many deliberate differences that – when you get used to them – are as different from Helvetica as pineapple is from mango. The a on Helvetica has a more prominent tail and a horizontal rather than vertical bar. There is no vertical descender on Arial’s G. The bar on Arial’s Q is wavy not straight.
But Arial is still regarded – and rightly so – as a cheat. It was consciously designed in the early 1980s to offer an alternative to Helvetica before Microsoft bundled it with its Windows operating system – specifically as a printer font to rival those bundled with Adobe’s exclusive software. Helvetica was owned by Linotype, so it was to be expected that Monotype would offer an alternative. But it wasn’t just the comparable looks that irked the design community, it was the fact that its width and other key elements fitted exactly the same grids that Helvetica occupied, thus making it interchangeable in any amount of documents and printing or display software.
When Microsoft took advantage of this in Windows 3.1 it did so because Arial was cheaper than Helvetica, and it wanted to save money on the licence fee. A sound business decision, unless one objected to the principle of capitalizing on another’s artistry. Monotype was not acting illegally, and in any case maintained – with some justice – that Arial was an updated version of their own Grotesque series from more than a century earlier.
Few of the millions who use Arial care. But among the design community, Arial retains bad blood. There is even a video on the Arial–Helvetica stand-off from CollegeHumor (google ‘Font Fight’). This is quite an elaborate story set in a warehouse, and features Helvetica’s gang – herself (female, smart), alongside a motley male gathering of (unshaven, Western), (General Patton), (Italian tenor), (cool black dude) and (wired reporter). Within moments they are confronted by Arial’s gang –, is glamorous and boastful, is a Red Indian, is sophisticated, is Egyptian and gay, and likes his beer.
‘Arial!’ Helvetica says. ‘I haven’t seen you since … since you cloned me and stole my identity!’ There are other little scores to settle: ‘Playbill, you took my land, you killed my family.’ ‘What are you gonna do about it, Tahoma – a raindance?’ Soon they are fighting, and Helvetica punches Arial to the ground. There is a late arrival in a colourful superhero outfit: ‘ is here to save the day!’ There’s no response, as everyone is already dead. ‘If anyone needs me,’ he says sheepishly, ‘Comic Sans will be over here …’
In another CollegeHumor video (‘Font Conference’), the same actors appear as different characters (Baskerville Old Face, ) to debate the granting of membership to Zapf Dingbats.
Hermann Zapf, the real-life creator of these symbols (which include legions of arrows, scissors, crosses and star shapes), does not, understandably, have much of a sense of humour regarding the pirating of his own work. In the 1970s, Zapf used the emergence of photocomposition to advance the cause of the lone unprotected artist and emphasize the threat of unlawful copying. He couldn’t have foreseen the full impact of the computer age on his craft, but his call for greater protection was prescient. And it fell on deaf ears.
Just a small selection of the huge array of Zapf’s dingbats
In October 1974, Zapf addressed the Library of Congress Copyright Office in Washington DC and made a heartfelt plea for greater protection. He observed that for about 450 years copying types had been an expensive and time-consuming business, as each would have to be cut by hand in the same manner as the original. Immense skill was needed to make a credible reproduction, and the possibility of fraud was therefore limited to a small handful of professionals.
In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the electrotyping machine in New York, theft became a little easier. Punchcutting was bypassed as moulds could be made directly, but this was still a highly skilled process and hugely expensive if one wanted to produce a range of weights (and we should remember that in any one weight, the basic alphabet was just the beginning; in every medium, bold or italic, there would be at least 150 characters or glyphs, including all the accents, ligatures, numbers and punctuation.) As late as 1963, the Parisian foundry owner Charles Peignot estimated that to make a full family of twenty-one weights would cost about 3.3m francs.
Hermann Zapf noted that court cases had rarely decided in favour of the designer. In 1905, the Federal Court in Washington heard a complaint from the American Type Founders Company that their Cheltenham range (which had cost them $100,000 to make) had been copied by the letterpress manufacturer Damon & Peets, but their claim failed. Shortly afterwards, Caslon Bold appeared in the courts, as the Keystone foundry of Philadelphia unsuccessfully tried to protect their type against a piratical publisher. And then the prolif
ic Frederic W Goudy also got fed up with seeing his types employed in situations where they had no licence (and he received no royalties), and he also sued, also without success and at great personal cost. The courts’ ruling in all these cases was: type is in the public domain, and has no characteristics other than utility. In Goudy’s case, the court found that ‘a design for a font of type is not patentable subject matter.’
And so it remains. There is a little more protection now in Europe, but in the US – the biggest single market – an alphabet cannot be protected. Or rather it can be protected only if each individual character – every italic condensed ‘a’, every ampersand and umlaut, every fraction and ornament – applies for and is granted its own patent. Given that many digital alphabets now have more than 600 such glyphs, this is almost impossibly time-consuming and devastatingly expensive, and only in a case such as Helvetica could it ever hope to pay dividends. For the other 100,000 or so less popular types, the most one can protect is the name, and the computer programming code that enabled the type to be made.*
Hermann Zapf, campaigner for type rights
Zapf’s pleas make as valid point today as they did when he presented them in the mid-1970s. ‘To make a living as a freelance designer, believe me, you have to work hard with your mind and with your hand,’ he told the City University in New York. ‘You want to earn at least enough money to dress your beloved wife nicely, to feed your children every day, and to live in a house where the rain does not drop on your drawing pad.’ He said that these necessities were becoming increasingly hard to come by, because the basic financial arrangements accepted in other art forms were not accepted in his. He used the example of Leonard Bernstein recording a new version of West Side Story for Columbia Records: Bernstein would get royalties, and if an unscrupulous smaller record company tried to pass it off as their own under the name of another orchestra and conductor they would be severely dealt with by copyright protection and the legal system. But type designers were more like apple growers cultivating unique fruit without protective fences; whenever someone stole them, they could argue that apples were the result of the sun and rain and God’s own fair intervention.
The alphabet as a free-for-all is an appealing concept, not least for lawmakers who fear the restriction of free speech (and the complex possibilities of distinguishing one lowercase ‘g’ from another). Zapf argued his case at a time when he believed there were 7,000 to 8,000 different typefaces, and he claimed, ‘I hold the world record for the most type designs copied without permission.’ In 2010, with the number of faces rather greater, and Zapf into his nineties and no longer designing, the title may still be his. But he has serious competition. Matthew Carter’s acknowledged revivals of classic types have themselves been ‘revived’ or cloned. He manages to take a magnanimous view, a view that perhaps only the very successful can afford to take.
‘Yes, there have been some horrible fights and rivalries,’ he says, ‘but generally speaking we all get on pretty well. I’ve got a friend in the fashion business who probably earns six times what I do. But there are a lot of really shitty people in the fashion business because there’s a lot of money in there. In type design there is not a lot of money, and that’s not what drives you. There are quarrels sometimes because somebody thinks someone’s ripped off their work, and very often they’re right. There are unscrupulous people in our business, but by and large people are fairly even tempered.’
Carter makes a distinction between the Helvetica clone from a company like Monotype that should know better and the designer with their head full of inadvertent influences from 550 years of history. ‘It’s happened to me that I’ll be working on something and suddenly I’ll look at it and think, “Wait a minute, I’m running into trouble here.” So I’ll call a designer up and say, “With the best possible motives I find myself encroaching on something you’ve already done – is that a problem?” And generally the answer has been “No”. Most of us have a pretty good idea if we’re getting too close to something. And I’ve had designers coming to me, and most of the time I don’t mind.’
Carter says he learned something valuable some years ago on a visit to Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London. He went to see the drummer Elvin Jones, who was once with John Coltrane. ‘He was part of the sainthood,’ Carter says, ‘and that night, he walked out before his set and announced that Buddy Rich had died that day. Here’s me, thinking I know about music, and I would have said, “Buddy Rich was a wunderkind, vaudeville, clownish, white, big band, and a show-off – how could Buddy Rich and Elvin Jones ever have anything in common?” But Jones came out and said some very moving things. It taught me a lesson. Two drummers have things in common.’
At FontShop in San Francisco, they tend to use two methods to determine whether a newly submitted typeface is different enough for them to promote and sell: their eyes, and font-editing software such as Fontographer. If they think something looks familiar they will open up two fonts in Fontographer and compare the new with its inspiration. They will enlarge each letter and examine its coordinates, and if the edges of the points in a few letters are identical, then they will investigate further. ‘It really is difficult to do something completely new,’ says FontShop’s type director Stephen Coles. ‘My view is that if a new face isn’t adding something to the landscape, then it’s not going to be something that we would want to sell. But there are battles all the time.’
A recent example concerned Segoe, created by Monotype and licensed to Microsoft, which bears a close relationship to Frutiger. Their common usage is different (Segoe for screen display at small sizes, Frutiger for signage), and they do not share the same digital width vectors like Helvetica and Arial, but their obvious similarity caused widespread disquiet in design circles. Some of the outrage was spurred by the fact that the main culprits were Microsoft, every creative’s favourite whipping-corp (if they are happy to ignore the fact that Microsoft commissioned some of the best screen fonts in common use, not least Georgia from Matthew Carter).
Stephen Coles and other type bureau people have more immediate worries: counterfeit or illegally copied fonts sold cheaply or available free at many dubious outlets. One can buy unlicensed fonts not only from online sites that look like honest concerns, but also from the same peer-to-peer download sites that offer shared music and films. Allan Haley, the Director of Words and Lettering at Monotype Imaging, has detected that most graphic designers do not set out to steal fonts, but may borrow fonts from colleagues without checking their origin or paying a licence fee. (Most genuine sites license their digital fonts to be used by a specified number of computers and printers – the greater the number, the more you pay; there will also be more expensive and elaborate corporate deals.) ‘Unfortunately, there are probably more illegal or pirate font distribution websites than there are legitimate sites,’ Haley has suggested in his blog at fonts.com. ‘They are run by people with no regard for the intellectual property rights of others. Eradicating these pirate sites is like trying to control a virulent fungus … Most of us wouldn’t consider buying a television off the back of a semi-trailer. Buying from a font pirate would be doing essentially the same thing.’
But even worse than that would be to use a pirated font on a campaign promoting anti-piracy. That would be really thoughtless, wouldn’t it?
In the second week of January 2010, the unfortunate people at HADOPI, the French government agency charged with the promotion of copyright protection on the Internet, woke up to a marketing disaster so huge and absurd that they may not have believed it was actually happening. The typeface they had chosen to promote their campaign on posters, film and all other communications, and which was called Bienvenue, turned out to be something they had no right to use. They couldn’t have licensed it legally either, because the font was an exclusive custom font designed for France Telecom.
Bienvenue was designed in 2000 by Jean François Porchez, an energetic designer whose Porchez Typofonderie was responsible for the digital l
ook of a fair part of France’s media and corporate branding. As well as providing the current face of the Paris Métro the company sold such designs as Parisine Office, Le Monde Sans, Le Monde Livre, and Apolline, the names themselves enough to transport you to the Place de la Concorde with café crème in hand. As is the norm these days, each alphabet will contain at least 600 glyphs, and would take many months to perfect. The fonts cost from €210 for use on up to eight machines to €8,640 for use on up to 5,000 machines – ie everyone catered for from the smallest design studio to a multinational company.
Sadly, the anti-piracy agency HADOPI couldn’t license Bienvenue no matter what the rates. Jean François Porchez had made the font in several weights exclusively for France Telecom in 2000, and since it was intended both for internal company use and branding, it was widely seen. It was also admired, particularly for the soft harmony of the letters and the warmth that the rounded strokes conveyed.
Plan Créatif, the design consultants charged with making the logo for HADOPI, obviously admired it too, as was made clear when it was unveiled by the French Ministry for Culture and Communication. The similarity was initially spotted by a designer who used to work for Typofonderie Porchez, and the word spread rapidly among the design community until it reached the mainstream media. Plan Créatif then started to backtrack, and disastrously so. It claimed that the use of the typeface was only intended as a draft, and had somehow been subject to ‘erroneous digital manipulation’. Three days after the logo was first unveiled, the agency announced that it was in a position to present its other, proper version. This was indeed a little different, and used the typeface designed by the London company Fontsmith.
One was then left to decide whether Plan Créatif had made a genuine mistake, or had performed a volte-face after it had been exposed. One answer came by checking the records at the French National Institute for Intellectual Property, which showed that its logo had been registered for official (ie not draft) use six weeks earlier. And another came when the graphic design writer Yves Peters and other bloggers decided to take matters further by calling Fontsmith and asking precisely when Plan Créatif had purchased FS Lola. They said that it was ‘rush-ordered’ on the very day the new logo was exposed.
Just My Type Page 14