Licensing

After more than a decade in the font business and 8+ years of selling font licenses directly from our website, we have revisited our font licensing model, always staying true to the principle of no-nonsense font licensing and keeping things as simple as possible.

First things first, a bit of font licensing basics: When you place an order on our website, you don’t get to own the fonts, you purchase a font license that grants you certain rights of usage.

Who should pay for a font license?

We know our fonts are used primarily by graphic designers, they are the true advocates of our work. They are the ones choosing them for their projects and putting them in front of their clients, but they shouldn’t pay for them, not alway at least. 

The actual owner of the license should always be the end client, which is the entity behind the brand commissioning the work, not the designer or agency creating it. When an end client needs to hire a studio to produce work for their brand, they just simply share their licensed font files with the design team; it’s that simple. 

Most of the time, a brand uses a particular typeface because it’s been advised by a designer to do so. In order to facilitate things, licenses can be purchased directly not only by the end client, but also by designers or agencies on their behalf. When a designer wants to use our fonts for multiple clients, each of those clients will need their own license. 

Continuing with this logic, designers should only have to buy a license when they are creating work for themselves, like their own studio branding or a personal project; that’s when they become the end client.

The larger the end client, the more value they can extract from the fonts.

Having different licenses for different usage scenarios doesn’t make sense anymore. They create confusion, they are harder to comply with, especially when there’s an ever growing myriad of touchpoints for brands to tap in. That’s why we discontinued our Desktop and Webfont licenses, focusing on the all-in-one Branding with Type license.

When calculating licensing fees, the number of users or desktop seats was the standard metric for decades, joined more recently by another myriad, this time of different metrics: pageviews, downloads, impressions, followers,... and the list goes on. Let’s forget about all of them.

Let’s remove complexity so you only have to worry about one single metric: the total number of people working in the company, the end client size. This means everyone, not just the actual people using the fonts. It’s no longer desktop seats.

What happens to the old licenses?

As our licenses are granted on perpetuity, all licenses purchased before 3 Feb 2025 from the Branding with Type website are still valid. You can continue using the fonts within the limitations set by the EULA document you received when placing your order.

If you would like to upgrade one of the discontinued Desktop or Webfont licenses, and/or you would like to switch from user count to employee size under a Branding with Type license, please get in touch and we will study your case.