It was the first PostScript illustration program with its release in January 1986 by Altsys, with version 2.0 coming out in the fall of 1986. Most people do not know it, but serious digital illustration for desktop publishing started with font design software. With the explosion of presstype in the 1960s and 70s, graphic designers suddenly had a few thousand fonts to use. Now the characters could be reproduced photographically.
Up until the 1950s, there were only a few hundred font designs available.īut that all changed with the development of phototype. Plus, font design is so restricted by its content that many fonts are derivative to start with. Prior to World War II, stealing a font design was so difficult that it was very rare. This is a new problem, beginning with phototype Any time you see a CD with a thousand fonts or more for ten bucks, it is almost certain they are all stolen.
Especially in the PC world, this problem is epidemic. But, scanning and tracing fonts is very easy and can be easily automated to try and slide around the copyright issues. If you use a font without paying for it, you are a thief. So, even in the United States, all fonts presently produced are copyrighted.
Font designers might do a couple of designs in their entire life.ĭigital fonts are software and the writing can be copyrighted Font designs were a huge investment of time and effort. Metal is difficult to carve so all you could really do was the best you were capable of carving. That did not matter as much in the 19th century and earlier because all font designs were made from hand-cut metal masters. In the United States it is grossly unethical to steal font designs.
Many countries allow you to copyright your font designs. Fonts designs cannot be copyrighted in the United States All of this is complicated by copyright laws. The font market is flooded with bad designers and automated thieves. Like authors, some are skilled and some are hacks. Here the norm is six to eight fonts per family or more.Ī font designer can easily invest large portions of his or her life designing a font. The minimum is usually four versions: Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic, but that is just the beginning for fonts used for book design. Plus, like a trilogy or multi-part series, a font design commonly comes is a set of fonts. This is especially true now that fonts have hundreds of characters. It takes hundreds of hours and commonly a year or more to design a font. But the market for font sales is much smaller. First of all, the time and effort required can be compared to writing a book. But, the situation is more critical for font designers. Now that authors are producing their own books, another wrinkle has been added.
In this digital age, the question of font usage comes up much more than it used to. Here’s his report, and I suggest you bookmark this page, you’ll want to come back.
Can they use the fonts that came with a software package in their book? On the cover? What about free font downloads, are those okay? I turned to type designer and author David Bergsland (whose last article here was Typography in Kindle? Yes We Can.) to straighten us out. Quite a number of authors have written recently to get some clarity on font usage.