I love how all these 'brand' fonts look indistinguishable to an untrained eye and still brain-frying-bordedom-inducingly close to each other to someone like me who actually studied & worked in typography.
It's just the design team running in place. And at a certain scale, it's cheaper to pay a type foundry $100k once, rather than paying Monotype continuous fees for a legacy family.
But as someone who has made multiple neutral sans families, I agree. The launch rhetoric about creating a differentiated visual identity is comical when you look at all the interchangeable corporate sans together.
Pretty sure it's just the pendulum swinging. Today its all about serious and clean and minimal. Then it will be whimsical and maximalist again. Skinny jeans, baggy jeans. Skeumorphic, flat.
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
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)
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.
You really should pay, especially for work by small foundries.
Making a typeface takes a tremendous amount of work. The financial upside is extremely hard to justify.
I think non-designers underestimate the amount of effort required by an order of magnitude. I put it in the territory of building indie games. Potentially years of your life go into it, and it's a huge problem if everyone pirates your work.
I'm actually a designer, have paid for many fonts - including licenses for websites - have made a couple myself and have a good idea how hard they are to make.
That said, a certain corporation's bought up a load of fonts made over the past x decades and is making a tidy sum selling old rope again and again without adding anything of value, or funding the original designers/converters, so I'm quite happy to illuminate how an individual can get around such things for use on their personal blog with an audience of ten, should they so wish.
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ed - you're also not as likely to be able to get a whole usable font from a small foundry in the first place, without buying it.
Legally, typeface designs do not receive protection (which is based on idiotic declarations like “you can’t copyright the alphabet”) but digital font files are considered programs and thus are able to be protected as IP.¹ You can try to justify the theft to yourself but somewhere there’s an individual (or on some occasions many individuals) who spent a long time making decisions about how that typeface should look and choosing the best points to turn it into splines to describe the shape and you decided that your laziness trumps their work.
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1. I would note that bitmap fonts do not receive the same protection as Type 1 or OTF fonts.
> Google Workspace lets brands who pay enough embed custom corporate fonts into their docs and slides. Normally, these are locked to just those brands shelling out for custom typefaces, but there's one loophole: the ol' copy/paste. Below are a selection of brand fonts with which you can do exactly that. Enjoy.
Why did we go from owning the software we run and being able to just modify things as we see fit to "You have to give Google a lot of money so you can have your own font in your own presentation"?
I'm going to go the unpopular route and ask, how mission-critical are fonts, really? Protected fonts such as these can't be mission-critical, legally, right?
Never felt myself lacking for fonts in Docs, myself. Quite the opposite, Google Fonts has way more than I'd ever have preinstalled and is now my primary avenue for typeface discovery.
You can still pay Microsoft money to get a desktop copy of Powerpoint, which will use your system fonts. Using google docs is entirely self-inflicted
Granted, you now need to pay Microsoft a monthly fee for Powerpoint instead of a one-time-fee. But that is in large part because too many people preferred Google Docs, so Microsoft tried to become more like them
You can still pay Microsoft a one-time-fee instead of a yearly one. You can even go to a physical store and get a physical box with Office (granted, it doesn't contain anything inside it anymore )
copy/paste doesn't tell you much - here's the text/html content they put on your clipboard if you're curious. Apparently GDocs supports this out of the box, just hides it from the selection box. Which makes sense given that it doesn't support any font.
> Google Workspace lets brands who pay enough embed custom corporate fonts into their docs and slides. Normally, these are locked to just those brands shelling out for custom typefaces, but there's one loophole: the ol' copy/paste.
I didn't know that many brands had their own bespoke fonts. Especially the less prominent players like Colgate or Korean Air. Was this caused by normal font licensing being so restrictive or expensive that they just decided to hire someone to make a font just for them, or design teams insisting that this sans serif that looks almost like all the others (but not quite) is essential to their design?
Remove the name from the font and I'm fairly certain that I'd get none of them, well maybe HP.
E.g. the Klarna Headline is pretty distinct, but I've never seen it before. The four other Klarna fonts are super generic. Also why do they need five different fonts?
Mostly I think these custom fonts are a waste of money. If you ship software that needs to include fonts, and you don't want to pay a license, it makes sense. If you do it because of "corporate identity" it seems pointless.
Different people work differently I suppose. It's true that some of the fonts seem designed to be forgettable, such as Source, Product, Optimistic. But others are, like Netflix, Verizon, Korean Air, HP, and Colgate look heavily branded to me.
I knew about this for Google’s own fonts but had no idea they offered the option to use custom fonts. Is there any easy place to find a list of them? I wonder if the custom fonts are just hardcoded/pushed to their CDN alongside all the other ones.
I really like the style of copying the “google tool” style that this website and jmail use. It makes the project feel different compared to all the ai-generated app these days.
Any idea how did the creator manage to get access to the fonts in the first place? Won't you need a Google Docs document which uses the given font and then copy it from there and put it up on the website? Or is there some way the creator could have put these fonts on his website from publicly available information?
A LONG time ago, I was shared on a document with a brand font and was surprised to see it was a custom one. With a bit of testing, I realized I could pull it into a new document and that new document would then become "infested" with that font and allow me to use it anywhere else within.
I recently realized there must be even more fonts that exist that I don't know of, so (transparently, with the help of Claude,) I ran through a list of potential clients (some listed on Google Workspace's site, some I just assumed) and tested across many. This is the list I came back with.
Have a look at the raw clipboard data with something like https://evercoder.github.io/clipboard-inspector/ and you'll see how it's all set up. A bunch of markup that can be obtained from any google doc with the font name updated.
It's just setting the font-family in the style attribute of a <span>. (As you can see by inspecting the text/html content of your clipboard, e.g. with `xclip -selection clipboard -o -t text/html`)
This is an architectural problem. These companies share their documents with externals, and the documents must behave normally to these externals. So it doesn't just have to look as intended, the external person also needs to be able to edit the documents with the CI fonts available.
One could imagine that access to the fonts could be restricted to the logged-in user, but that would mean that public documents that can be accessed without a login wouldn't have the specific fonts.
The licenses (from major foundries/vendors) are indeed usually quite restrictive; however, the hard part has always been enforcing them. It's not surprising to me that Google hasn't built any guardrails around this.
After all, gating by IP address? What happens if someone from the marketing team logs on from an airport? All of the slides revert to Arial?
Ehh.. a lot of these docs go out to customers and end users. Playboy for instance sends out tons of their updates and plans to clients with their own custom fonts in it.
Related: https://eidosdesign.substack.com/p/why-every-brand-looks-the...
But as someone who has made multiple neutral sans families, I agree. The launch rhetoric about creating a differentiated visual identity is comical when you look at all the interchangeable corporate sans together.
A brand is still free to commission a copy/clone of an 'interesting' font that has character (or, beware even serifs) ...
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.
I was surprised to receive the DMCA (it is hosted on GitHub Pages). I ignored the emails because…I’m lazy.
They (GitHub) eventually took down the repository (and site). So I swapped to another font and I don’t think my wife noticed.
I think all of this was still easier than probably paying for the font!
Lesson of the story? Don’t underestimate the impact of laziness on your potential customers.
You can also just stick them in a font-editor and re-export "as your own font" with some minor tweaks. Not that you should, of course.
Making a typeface takes a tremendous amount of work. The financial upside is extremely hard to justify.
I think non-designers underestimate the amount of effort required by an order of magnitude. I put it in the territory of building indie games. Potentially years of your life go into it, and it's a huge problem if everyone pirates your work.
That said, a certain corporation's bought up a load of fonts made over the past x decades and is making a tidy sum selling old rope again and again without adding anything of value, or funding the original designers/converters, so I'm quite happy to illuminate how an individual can get around such things for use on their personal blog with an audience of ten, should they so wish.
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ed - you're also not as likely to be able to get a whole usable font from a small foundry in the first place, without buying it.
You can't copyright the alphabet.
>and it's a huge problem if everyone pirates your work.
I've never pirated a font. Not once have I boarded a ship in the middle of the ocean, gun in hand, taking the crew and cargo of typography hostage.
But more seriously, I acknowledge that it's a problem. It's just not my problem.
You're not paying to use the alphabet, there are plenty of perfectly legible typefaces that are completely free for you to use.
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1. I would note that bitmap fonts do not receive the same protection as Type 1 or OTF fonts.
One of the major issues we had at my previous company weaning people off of powerpoint (to google docs) was brand fonts. Ours, of course.
A lot of what is considered brand identity in presentations comes from fonts, which makes Google Docs Slides a non-starter for many unfortunately.
(we ended up making them in powerpoint and using the Google Docs compatibility mode with pptx).
So, I need to be super rich? Thats sad.
Then because your contract with Google is large enough to matter, they'll add your custom corporate branded fonts to your font dropdowns.
Where did things go this wrong?
Never felt myself lacking for fonts in Docs, myself. Quite the opposite, Google Fonts has way more than I'd ever have preinstalled and is now my primary avenue for typeface discovery.
Are you building a slide deck on your systems architecture? Probably doesn't matter.
Are you building a marketing deck on your new corporate identity? Probably matters a lot.
Either way, the tool I'm using shouldn't be the one deciding what matters and what doesn't. Just let me use my font as I please!
Such companies should be mocked and shamed, not held up as examples to follow.
Yes, the EULA may prohibit modifications of local installations, but you’re not physically restricted from doing so - only contractually.
Granted, you now need to pay Microsoft a monthly fee for Powerpoint instead of a one-time-fee. But that is in large part because too many people preferred Google Docs, so Microsoft tried to become more like them
This isn’t much different; there still are plenty of non-Google options for creating presentations to choose from that do allow using your own font.
<html> <body> <!--StartFragment--><meta charset='utf-8'><meta charset="utf-8"><b style="font-weight:normal;" id="docs-internal-guid-8b11d82e-1a25-4b6a-be64-ebdd55b2a698"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:22pt;font-family:'Facebook Sans',sans-serif;color:#000000;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;white-space:pre-wrap;">I just stole Facebook Sans</span></p></b><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><!--EndFragment--> </body> </html>
E.g. the Klarna Headline is pretty distinct, but I've never seen it before. The four other Klarna fonts are super generic. Also why do they need five different fonts?
Mostly I think these custom fonts are a waste of money. If you ship software that needs to include fonts, and you don't want to pay a license, it makes sense. If you do it because of "corporate identity" it seems pointless.
It's still an 80 billion dollar company in market cap, so there is that.
Also I'm guessing it's so they have another means of attack on knock off products that directly copy them.
A LONG time ago, I was shared on a document with a brand font and was surprised to see it was a custom one. With a bit of testing, I realized I could pull it into a new document and that new document would then become "infested" with that font and allow me to use it anywhere else within.
I recently realized there must be even more fonts that exist that I don't know of, so (transparently, with the help of Claude,) I ran through a list of potential clients (some listed on Google Workspace's site, some I just assumed) and tested across many. This is the list I came back with.
One could imagine that access to the fonts could be restricted to the logged-in user, but that would mean that public documents that can be accessed without a login wouldn't have the specific fonts.
After all, gating by IP address? What happens if someone from the marketing team logs on from an airport? All of the slides revert to Arial?
Various print shops have systems in place for previewing/approving print jobs as well.