A corporate font is the one part of your visual identity you never really own. You buy a licence for a specific use, and the moment that use changes, you pay again. Most companies find this out during their first big campaign, when a designer asks whether the web licence is covered too.
Key takeaways
- Type is sold as a licence for a use case, not as a file: desktop, web, app, product embedding. One licence does not cover the others.
- Desktop licences are counted per device, web licences are often counted per monthly page view. A traffic spike quietly moves you into a higher tier.
- Font disputes are real. Typographer Thomas Phinney keeps a public list of cases that includes House Industries versus NBC Universal in 2012 over 3.5 million dollars and Berthold versus Volvo in 2017 over 1.5 million.
- Google Fonts offers more than 1500 families under the SIL Open Font License, which covers desktop, web and apps at once, commercially and for free.
- Check the language coverage before anything else. A face missing accented characters will fight you in every second headline.
- There is a ten minute self check at the end you can run before you spend a cent.
What are you actually buying when you buy a brand font?
You are buying permission, not a file. A typeface is a protected work and the licence agreement spells out exactly what you may do: how many machines you may install it on, whether you may upload it to a server, whether you may embed it in a mobile app, and whether you may hand it to an outside supplier.
Here is the practical version. When your agency sends a logo in outlines, the type inside it is settled forever, because outlines are shapes, not a font. Website headlines, slide decks, packaging and video captions all need the live font, and there the licence keeps running for everyone who touches it.
If you are organising your identity from scratch, write the licences straight into the brand manual. Not because it looks professional, but because in two years nobody will remember what was bought and for how many machines.
What types of font licence exist?
They split by where the font is loaded. Monotype, one of the largest type foundries in the world, breaks it down in its guide to font licensing explained like this:
- Desktop. Installed on a machine, used for static output: logos, posters, PDFs, packaging. Counted per device, typically 1, 5 or 25.
- Web. The font sits on your server and loads in the visitor browser. Counted by traffic or by domain, and usually an annual subscription rather than a one off purchase.
- App. The font is embedded in a mobile app or in software you sell. Usually the most expensive tier, because the type becomes part of your product.
- Everything else. Ebooks, broadcast, display advertising. Small foundries sometimes bundle these in, large ones almost never do.
The classic mistake looks harmless: the company buys a desktop licence for a designer, the designer builds the website, and a developer uploads the same file to the server. At that moment you are out of licence even though you paid in good faith.
Where do brands end up paying twice?
Almost always in the same four places, and all four are predictable.
Suppliers. A desktop licence usually covers your own staff, not an outside agency, a printer or a production studio. When a client sends us a brand package, one of our first questions is whether we may use the font ourselves or whether artwork should arrive already outlined.
Traffic growth. Web licences are tiered by page views. The campaign that lifts your traffic quietly lifts your licence tier, and the invoice shows up a year later at renewal.
New machines. You license five computers, a year later the marketing team has ten, and nobody connects the two.
Fonts from unknown sources. Type downloaded from a random free font site often has no clear licence, and when it ends up on packaging you are solving it backwards. According to the case list kept by Thomas Phinney, most of these settle privately, but the published claims run into the hundreds of thousands and beyond.
When is a free Google Fonts family enough?
For most small and mid sized companies it is genuinely enough, and it is a real choice rather than a compromise. Google Fonts holds more than 1500 families and almost all of them run under the SIL Open Font License, which covers desktop, web and product embedding in one permission, commercially and at no cost.
The difference against paid type is not legality, it is distinctiveness. Pick Poppins or Montserrat and your brand will look like a thousand others. If your category is crowded, that is a real problem. If it is not, put the saved budget into photography and video, which a customer notices far more than the shape of a letter.
The middle path we suggest most often: paid type for headlines and a free family for body copy.
How do you choose type that fits the brand?
Start from how the brand should sound, not from what you like. If you already have a documented tone of voice, the typeface is its visual translation: a serious brand cannot carry a rounded playful face, and a playful brand should not be stuck with a dry office serif.
Run every candidate through these five checks:
- Language coverage. Type a sentence with every accented character your markets need. If one glyph drops out or looks bolted on, drop the font however pretty it is.
- Weights. A brand needs at least four: regular, medium, bold and an italic. Two weights cannot build a document hierarchy.
- Numerals. If you produce price lists, reports or tables, you need tabular figures, otherwise columns will never line up.
- Small sizes. Look at the font at twelve points on a phone, not at a hundred and twenty in a deck. Most type falls apart there.
- The licence. Read the agreement before you send the file to anyone else.
When is a custom typeface not worth it?
Almost always below roughly a hundred thousand euros of annual marketing spend. A custom face costs tens of thousands of euros and months of work, and it pays back either through licence savings at enormous scale or through being impossible to copy. That maths works for banks and global brands, not for a company of five.
To be fair to ourselves: a bigger branding project earns us more, so we could push custom type every time. We do not. For a smaller company the visible difference sits in decent photography and one good company video, not in owning a typeface. Customers only notice type when it is bad.
How do you check where you stand in ten minutes?
Open this list and answer yes or no. Every no is a task for this week, not a reason to panic.
- Do I know the name of our brand font and do we have proof of purchase?
- Do we hold separate desktop and web licences?
- Do I know how many devices the licence covers and how many we actually use?
- Do outside suppliers know whether they may use the font, or do we send outlines?
- Does the font carry full accent coverage for our markets and at least four weights?
- Is all of this written down somewhere a colleague could find without us?
Four noes is not a disaster. It is an hour of work and one email to the foundry.
If you are putting together a visual identity and you are not sure where the typography stands, get in touch. On creative and branding projects we settle licensing at the start, so it never turns into a problem that can only be solved with money. A short message through our contact page is enough and we will walk through it with you.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use a font my agency bought for me?
It depends whose name the licence is in. If the agency bought it for itself, it covers their machines, not yours. Ask for a licence issued to your company ideally before the project starts, otherwise you will buy the same font twice and the second time under pressure.
Is Google Fonts really free for commercial use?
Yes. Practically the whole library runs under the SIL Open Font License, which allows commercial use, modification and embedding in a product you sell, as long as you do not sell the font itself. One thing to watch: loading fonts straight from Google servers also touches visitor privacy, so it is safer to self host the files.
How much does a decent brand font cost?
From the purchases we make for clients, a quality family from an independent foundry lands in the low hundreds of euros for a small team desktop licence and a similar amount for a basic web licence. Every foundry prices differently, so check with them directly. Custom type starts in the tens of thousands.
What if we have used an unlicensed font for years?
Contact the foundry yourself and buy the licence retroactively. Most cases settle by paying for what was used, and a company that comes forward is in a far better position than one that gets found.
