Font licensing, compliance tips and typography guides for web professionals.
Large government organisations can have hundreds of websites under their remit. The main site might be perfectly on-brand, but what about every agency subsite, legacy microsite, procurement portal and...
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Did you know that many commercial fonts - especially ones from boutique foundries - explicitly prohibit logo use without purchasing a separate, more expensive license? It's easy to miss. You buy a fo...
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Some font foundries generate as much revenue from enforcement - what they call "retroactive licence sales" - as they do from normal licensing. That's not speculation. According to an industry report i...
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You bought a desktop font license. You used Font Squirrel's webfont generator to convert it from OTF to WOFF2. You uploaded it to your website. The technical conversion worked perfectly. The legal si...
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Multiple font detection tools exist online. Most tell you which fonts appear on a website - the family name, weights, and styles. That's useful, but it's only half the story. FontReport was built dif...
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The call comes in on a Tuesday afternoon. Your client's legal team forwarded a cease and desist letter from a font foundry. The website you launched eight months ago uses fonts without proper web lice...
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You've just taken over a website from a previous developer. The design looks great, but you have no idea which fonts are being used or whether they're properly licensed. This happens constantly. A cl...
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In January 2022, a German court ruled that websites using Google Fonts violate GDPR and ordered a site owner to pay €100 in damages. The court warned that future violations could result in fines up to...
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NBCUniversal didn't just get sued once for font licensing violations. They got sued three times in three years. Font Bureau sued them for $2 million in 2009. P22 Type Foundry sued for $1.5 million in...
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You bought a font license for $200. You're using it in Photoshop and Illustrator without issues. Now you want to use it on your website, so you convert it to WOFF2 and upload it. Done, right? Not qui...
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You found the perfect font for your project. It's free to download. You add it to your website, use it in client work, maybe even on product packaging. Then six months later, you get a cease and desis...
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