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Appropriation and Type - Before and Today  was written by Ricardo Lafuente. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this text under the terms of the GNU General Public License, the GNU Free Documentation License, or the Free Art License.

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Appropriation and Type - Before and Today  was written by Ricardo Lafuente. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this text under the terms of the GNU General Public License, the GNU Free Documentation License, or the Free Art License.

Appropriation and Type – Before and Today

Appropriation has been a recurring and accepted strategy in defining typography as an activity and a business. We can pinpoint four cases where appropriation has been key in defining landmarks in the history of type, not only aiding the breaking of technical and creative boundaries but also helping to question legal and moral ones.

A brief analysis of the current situation in typography will follow, focusing on the approach to the subject by corporations, users and designers. The current business model (digital foundries, font files with copyrights) is, as we’ll argue, a remnant of a time where a typeface filled a whole drawer and fails to account for the necessary changes that the information age demands.

Finally, we’ll conclude with the definition of an essentially contradictory business model that has a very strong stance against “font forging” and copyright issues, although it has historically – and now, more than ever – thrived on constant, and often uncredited, appropriation of ideas and designs.

Appropriation in Type through History

We could certainly identify many more instances of inspiration or downright copying of ideas in typography, but these four cases will suffice to demonstrate the different uses of copy, inspiration and appropriation in general. Our focus here will be on the issue of creative appropriation (inspiration) on one hand, and corporate business models and copyright issues (plagiarism) on the other.

The Gutenberg Press

In 1450, Johannes Gutenberg produced the first commercially viable model of his printing press, which was widely used for centuries until the advent of the Linotype machine, the first way to automate, though only partially, the type setting and printing process. Gutenberg’s press was the result of the combination of five key methods and processes, three, possibly four, of which were not original:

This shows that originality, in a time before copyrights and patents existed, is not a straightforward issue. It was not before 1700 that the first copyright statute appeared in Britain – the protection of ideas could have changed the fate of this invention and the combination of methods made. The point here is that they were combined in a way that made typography as we know it possible, and there seems to be absolutely no question regarding the legitimacy of this invention made possible by appropriating previous methods and processes. Gutenberg’s model of printing stood firm for centuries until the Linotype machine introduced partial automation of the printing process.

Stanley Morison and Monotype

In 1886, the Linotype machine began to be produced by the Mergenthaler Printing Co. in the United States. This machine revolutionised the printing process by introducing a degree of automation, allowing for quick composition of lines of text. It wouldn’t take long (a year) for Lanston Monotype to begin production of their own fully automated typesetting machine, devised by Tolbert Lanston, which could typeset whole pages from a mechanical keyboard input.

In 1922, Stanley Morison was appointed as typographic advisor of the Monotype Corporation (the British branch of the Philadephia company), a post he would keep until 1967. The Monotype Corporation built an extensive catalogue of cuts made by Morison from classic references, such as Bodoni, Bembo, Baskerville, and several others. These revivals helped bring general interest to the old masters’ works They were also a key marketing strategy to try to push up the value of the Monotype machine – the faces available would definitely determine the decision of a buyer who fancies a particular style, and thus the Monotype Corporation had no qualms about recruiting all the classics, which were by then in the public domain.

It is tremendously unfair, though, to portray Morison as a hijacker – he was one of the hallmarks of 20th century type, being responsible for the creation of the Times typeface and hugely influencing the field of typography to the present day through the efforts he dedicated to bringing the classics to the general public – legitimately appropriating other designs. Without Morison’s endeavour, our legacy would no doubt be poorer today.

Arial, Monotype and Microsoft

1982 is the year in which the Arial typeface was released by Monotype Typography, Monotype Corporation’s type design division. Designed by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders, this typeface had a remarkable impact. Not only does it have obvious similarities to other modern sans serifs (sharing features with Helvetica, Univers and Akzidenz Grotesk), it exactly mirrors the glyph width tables from Helvetica, which is the data included in a font file that describes each character’s dimensions – an exact match that gives little chance of coincidence.

Microsoft licensed Arial from Monotype instead of the more expensive Helvetica, and in 1990 it was bundled with Microsoft Windows 3.1. It has been a staple of Windows systems until today. This is a specific case where a typeface was chosen not for its genuine creative and/or practical value but based upon external reasons, in this case driven by financial motives. Type designers are almost unanimous in shunning Arial as a lesser typeface: it is notably absent from Robert Bringhurst’s typeface selection in The Elements of Typographic Style (the current all round reference on type design from the designer’s perspective), and is also only mentioned as a passing remark on Robin Nicholas’s entry on the typographic encyclopaedic survey by Friedl et al.1 This is pretty much a clear indication of type designers’ consensus on the Arial issue; it’s also worth noting that there has been, to date, no attempt to replace Arial as a standard font in operating systems.2 In strict law and copyright terms, it’s appropriate to compare the Arial case to a cheating student who argues that the fact that his exam has exact passages from his nearest classmates’ exams owes to coincidence. It is equally reasonable to argue that borrowing from three sources rather than just one does not make the situation more acceptable.

So Arial stands in mixed principles: the type community is almost unanimous in calling shenanigans, but it has still made its way into our current operating systems despite that fact – it didn’t face any legal actions as of 2008.

Segoe

In early 2006, Microsoft announced a significant effort to dignify type design in their upcoming Vista operating system: six type designers – Lucas de Groot and Robin Nicholas figuring among them – were commissioned to design appropriate typefaces for screen and print. The result was six very attractive fonts that not only could appeal to general uses by less savvy people for simple word processing tasks, but also suit the type designers’ fancy.

Another font included in Vista is Segoe, a revival of Frutiger Next (which in turn is a revival of Frutiger) that Microsoft licensed from Monotype and altered. It’s not the first case in which Adrian Frutiger’s work has been remade, Adobe’s Myriad and Apple’s Podium Sans also bear a striking resemblance to Frutiger’s structure. When Microsoft registered Segoe in Europe in 2004, Linotype sued for copyright infringement since European law, unlike the American one, recognises the rights to font designs (although patent law is often used to circumvent this legal void in the U.S.).

The most significant fact is that Microsoft based their defence not on the issue of originality – stating the differences between Segoe and Frutiger Next, but on the fact that Linotype wasn’t selling its typeface in Europe when the request was filed. This situation could very well be interpreted as an admission by Microsoft’s part that the font in fact owes credit to Frutiger’s design.

This case becomes all more revealing in that it is both a high profile and current example of an attempt to settle the authenticity of a type design in courts. Unlike Arial, it didn’t sneak past the critics and found serious hurdles while Microsoft tried to implement it in its Windows OS. The EU ended up rejecting Segoe’s application, prompting the release of a modified version that bore less resemblance to the Frutiger typeface. The plaintiff, Linotype, was acquired by Monotype Imaging – the designers of Segoe – in 2006.

The Digital Typography Paradigm

Typography, and type design in particular, is historically defined by a constant recursion of past themes and trends, be it as inspiration, revivals, or as a way to question them – as in postmodern type examples, such as Emigre’s or David Carson’s work. Nevertheless, modern designs still owe heavily (with or without credit) to a tradition of arts and crafts spanning five centuries.

Meanwhile, during the last two decades, the type world hasn’t ceased discussing the issue of rights and plagiarism, a discussion that was sparked by the digital revolution and the introduction of the personal computer as an all purpose design and production tool. This shift implied that the tools used in typography and book production ceased to be the sole domain of type makers, printers and book publishers – the only ones who could afford the initial investment of a type foundry, workshop or printing press and manage it effectively. Designing type soon became cheaper and cheaper, as the physical and financial burden of the new tools gradually became less and less significant. Nowadays, a computer and a printer can do in minutes what a huge phototypesetting equipment would have taken a lot of time, effort and money to produce ten years ago.

The key effect of the digital revolution in type design is that typefaces became fonts – a radical change in that they were no more lead blocks but data – files that describe how each glyph should be drawn on screen or on a printer. A free software solution to type design, FontForge, was released in 2004, doing away with any software costs involved in font creation and editing, meaning the only overhead for a type design business would be a PC, paper, drawing tools, an image capture device (scanner or camera) and eventually an internet connection. This change has serious repercussions in the whole typography market: now type design wouldn’t, in theory, require any kind of intermediaries between the typographer/designer and its audience. Reality developed otherwise, as we will see from three standpoints in typography usage and creation.

Corporate Type

The digital revolution made a deep redefinition of most areas of study possible. We will show, though, that the field of typography has been lagging behind when it comes to taking advantage of the digital medium. Moreover, the corporate business model has failed to account for the specific needs and features of information technology, sticking to an artificial market sustained by an inflated value attributed to digital files as if they still were physical objects that are owned.

Nowadays, there are three major players in the type business: Microsoft, Adobe and Monotype Imaging.

Apple Computer hasn’t been a key figure in the type market (concentrating on developing font technology for its operating system), but it had an essential role in developing the actual playing field. Apple heralded the personal computer era in with their original Macintosh and has intermittently collaborated and competed with Microsoft and Adobe, being responsible for the development of the TrueType font format along with Microsoft as a response to Adobe’s expensively priced PostScript Type I font description format. The release of TrueType in 1991 forced Adobe to gradually reduce prices and eventually follow suit, releasing the PostScript specifications so that software developers could implement it in their programs without limitations.

Adobe Systems Inc., besides being responsible for a highly successful suite of imaging and DTP software, has a very strong position in the type market: not only is it a type vendor (through its typography division, Adobe Type) but also the most influential company in the sense that it owns most digital design solutions, especially after acquiring its main rival Macromedia in April 2005 and facing no significant competition in its market.

Microsoft is responsible for creating the most widely used operating system in personal computers, as well as the most popular office suite. Along with Adobe, Microsoft developed the currently dominant OpenType file format, which is freely available to developers as long as they agree to its rather restrictive licensing terms. Adobe converted its entire type collection to OpenType in a move to spread the new standard.

Monotype Imaging is now a distant remnant of Tolbert Lanston’s original creation. It has adjusted technical breakthroughs in the 20th century and claimed a staunch position in today’s digital type market. It was acquired by Agfa in 1999 forming Agfa Monotype, which in turn was acquired by T. A. Associates, a North American investment firm, changing its name to Monotype Imaging and developing a position in font software and rendering engines. It also secured a strong standpoint in the font vendor market after acquiring its rival Linotype, along with the rights to their entire type collection.

User Type

Most people get introduced to digital type by means of text editors. The digital revolution would be the perfect reason to finally open typography to everyone and make it a mainstream subject instead of a limited access craft. Things have happened otherwise, though, and the inability to create a suitable interface for allowing basic experimentation with type has severely crippled the possibilities of the new medium.

The font selection paradigm has changed little during the years, offering a whole collection of typefaces in a drop down menu. Such is the immediateness of digital type: It’s just there, no need to open drawers with thousands of lead characters. Users are encouraged, by means of a simple GUI, to just pick their font and get to work on their document. Even more: you don’t even need to choose, just stick with the default choice the software maker has made for you. Word processing interfaces also assume the user doesn’t want to be bothered with layout choices such as margins, structure – and they also make the choice for us (incidentally, they also made it quite awkward to change these defaults). In short: the standard word processing interface tells users not bother to with type.

This paradigm helps to build the general perception that a font is a finished, shrinkwrapped and untouchable product – pretty much like pre-packaged software. Although font files can be opened and edited as long as we have an appropriate editor, most typeface editors are either crude or catering exclusively to the type designer market. The user usually isn’t able to reach the underpinnings and intricacies of type, instead being expected just to understand that the default template is more than enough.

Such an approach to software designing effectively discourages any kind of interest in typographic issues by the general public, and helps to fuel the thought that fonts are “just there”. It’s worth noting that there is still no easy and streamlined way to buy, install and use fonts, unlike most other digital markets – iTunes would be a good example of that kind of market strategy. There’s an obvious reluctance to develop alternative business models for type design.

Designer Type

The type designer community is centred on the study of classical and modern examples and making attempts to postulate theory and practical guidelines for the craft of type design, sitting somewhere between the methods of architecture and those of poetry.

Fred Smeijers, a highly regarded Dutch type designer, analyses the type designer’s duty quite straightforwardly in his manifesto Type Now. On the issue of the responsibilities of type designers and commitment to specific guidelines, he states that

a type designer cannot escape this responsibility of judgement (…). In the end, people – the society – either accept it or they don’t3

Society, it seems, would be the ultimate judge of whether a typeface is a hallmark of craft or doomed to failure.

On the other hand, we find a curious account on Smeijers’s description on Fontana, a typeface by Ruben Fontana inspired by Meta: he describes it as “uncomplicated”, “tres sympathique”, “sunny” and “open minded”.4 This certainly sounds more like a description of a person or a song than of an object, and indeed sheds some doubt on the much touted objectiveness of good type design. It seems impossible to find serious and objective terms to classify a typeface’s features. Historical categorisations of design tendencies vary from author to author, and although there are some widely used terms to describe historical periods and typeface features, such as “transitional type” or “slab serifs”, there’s a tendency to borrow from poetry and music to identify a type family’s “soul” (which, though relevant from an artist or a historical point of view, is rather unscientific).

This is not a contradiction, though, since we can distinguish between type as a creative activity (in which there would be no problem with this kind of analogy) and type as an industry and commodity (where profit, market tendency, shareholder demands and legal requirements imply that things have a definite value and purpose). Naturally, Smeijers’s interest is in the craft and art of typography, and not the market and the economic relationships that it spawns. On the other hand, our interest is definitely that which Smeijers doesn’t care for.

We must assert that defending the status of type as a functional solution to practical problems requires an objective set of rules that derive from the way we read and write. We cannot yet account for matters of objective legibility while we do not possess all information on our mental processes and the mechanisms in the brain involved in acquiring and processing written information – this is the responsibility of cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

We know, from history, that a text with generous line spacing will certainly read better than other with no line spacing at all. The German blackletter used by Gutenberg in his Bible, however, is almost unreadable to a contemporary westerner’s eyes and definitely alien to someone from a non-Western background. In the fifteenth century, though, it was certainly the norm. History can help to avoid repeating our mistakes, but it also shows the relative importance of our current standards. In short, we still cannot objectively define type, and won’t be able to before a major breakthrough in neural science. However, copyright issues and legal matters impose formal specifications on what a font is and what it is not. Whether a typeface is a tweak, a revival or a work of art is left to the courts.

Tweaking and Reviving

In order to explain the type designer’s first reluctance to embrace the digital alternative, and also to understand how design processes are not as straightforward as they are presented to us, we’ll concentrate on Fred Smeijers’s account on the current state of events in typography. Specifically, we’ll borrow his term font tweaking.5 This process consists of loading a font, “tweaking” it – altering small details – and releasing it with different names, thereby circumventing copyright laws, since U.S. Law protects font names as trademarks, but not font designs. Smeijers is clear in pointing that font tweakers have nothing to do with type design at all, reinforcing the distinction between doing type as a labour of love and doing it for a profit.

Font revivals, on the other hand, are reinterpretations of existing designs, and our best example would be Morison’s effort in bringing the classical designs into the Monotype type library. Revivals matter to us because they aren’t original productions (as they draw inspiration from existing designs) but aren’t copies either (because no rights over them could be warranted otherwise, since there would be no original idea).

Digital type foundries and vendors still maintain the tradition, digitising and redoing the old masters’ work. It’s worth noting that even if a certain typeface, such as those with expired copyrights, resides in the public domain, anyone can make a digital version – a revival – and claim the rights to it.

Digital type catalogues are rife with revivals: In Bringhurst’s inventory of digital foundries, we can find 14 that issue revivals, and 4 that only release original designs.6 This interest in resuscitating previous designs also has motives that stand apart from simple typographic archaeology. Revivals are routinely issued by vendors and foundries to protect the rights of the rights holder when a typeface’s copyright is about to expire. Such is the case with Avenir LT, Adobe Garamond and Frutiger Next – which is what allowed Linotype to retain the rights to the original design and be able to sue Microsoft in the Segoe case.

Revivals reside in a kind of legal no man’s land – some, like Arial (which is more a tweak than a declared revival), manage to stick around while others, like Segoe, raise copyright lawyers’ eyebrows.

Given these two aspects, one cannot but wonder that a type designer wouldn’t be thrilled with this perspective. One has also to question why there is such a rift in reactions between font tweaking and font revivals, which can be interpreted as no more than corporate font tweaking. A practical example of this is MyFonts.com’s description of the Avenir LT font – a “recut version of Avenir”, stating that “The ‘LT’ was added to the name as the metrics differ from the original version”. This definitely corresponds to Smeijer’s description of font tweaking, despite the fact that the name change wasn’t intended to avoid legal troubles, but to assert the brand of the author of the revival. What is a revival, then, other than a corporate sanctioned font tweak?

Free software and Type Design

So far, we’ve kept our focus on corporate approaches to type design. As of 2008, the digital design tools field is dominated by Adobe Systems Inc. with its Creative Suite bundle of applications targeting photo, video, vector and sound editing. Adding to that the fact that Adobe software is the staple in most design courses in Europe and the United States, it can be stated that we are, indeed, faced with stifled possibilities when choosing digital creative tools, a monoculture of sorts. Although there have been parallel efforts from the free software and open source world to create alternatives, Adobe’s sole dominance in this market remains unquestioned.

Going back to type design, we could point Donald Knuth’s TeX and Metafont as the best examples of an alternative approach to designing type on computers.

Having come from the UNIX crowd, and hailed as one of its most highly regarded representatives, Donald E. Knuth reflected this background in his efforts to create a simple system for dynamic typesetting. TeX was first released in 1989, with several new versions being introduced during the ’90; its most recent update was released on 2002. It is still very popular among the academic and scientist audience for typesetting papers, since TeX excels at accurately setting and displaying mathematical formulae and including them in book layouts.

For an Adobe software user, TeX will definitely look alien, not least because of its lack of a graphical user interface, instead relying on command line input for operating. Instead of the mainstream point and click, drag and drop way of laying out and manipulating text and image boxes, TeX is meant for processing specifically crafted plaintext files, in turn outputting a printer-ready, typeset document. While requiring a rather steep learning curve, TeX introduced a model of digital typesetting that would be mostly put aside by the software houses that produced GUI page layout editors.

Metafont was designed to be the font handling backend for TeX. It is based on a modular method of generating letterforms, based on instructions fed to the Metafont processor, which outputs valid font files for use in TeX documents. Computer Modern, the hallmark font of TeX, was created by Knuth using Metafont, and sports variable parameter such as stroke thickness, serif dimensions and shape contrast. Thus, by tweaking the parameters, one could create endless variations on letterforms, treating them as data to be manipulated, in contrast with the commercial model of fonts as unique authored pieces.

Due to its lack of a GUI – an absence that a seasoned hacker would see as a good feature – TeX and Metafont presented little appeal for business opportunities. As such, these two programs remain largely unknown to the non-computer scientist audience since, among other reasons, you won’t easily find a book introducing TeX as you would a book on Adobe InDesign.

Still, the Metafont model can be the foundation of a new model of regarding typography and type design. Because of its simple input/output architecture, it is only missing a proper interface for easy operation, along with compatibility with existing formats. Other projects, such as MetaType1 or LiveType – not the Apple product, but a parametric approach to typeface construction, presented in 1997 at SIGGRAPH – show that a modular, open-ended approach to fonts is possible and has definite advantages over the manual creation process that’s the norm in applications such as Fontographer, FontLab or its comprehensive free software alternative, Fontforge.

Technology on Arcane Standards

The current terminology used in typography is also a clear signal of how it still depends on former traditions instead of adapting to its new medium. Digital typography’s rules and terminology have been determined by its physical counterparts, and that still hasn’t changed. For example, we still talk about “leading” – a term for the spacing between lines that takes its name from the lead strips used for that purpose – although the term “line spacing” is gradually replacing it in user oriented applications such as Microsoft Word.

Another example – while type foundries got that name because of their heavy use of metal, single person studios with Macs are still referred to as “foundries”. And fonts are described as being “cut” or “cast”, more than “digitised”. We talk about “digital versions” instead of digital copies, perhaps to preserve their history and soul and not treat them as just another file in a user’s computer.

Although we can forgive this persistence in using traditional typesetting terms, it also is a symptom that the type activity and business have failed to redefine themselves for the digital medium. On the other hand, these examples can actually be interpreted as quite an artificial and linguistic way to value the work of the typographer, probably with the aim of distinguishing between “true” type designers and mere font tweakers, and not let “true” typography be contaminated by the creeping tweaker threat.

What Now?

Given that digital type has been hanging around for thirty years, the progress in improving on font technology and taking advantage of the digital medium has been rather low. On the other hand, type designers in general (with the exception of rare cases such as Emigre or Letterror) have not tried to get to grips with font technology, rather limiting themselves to drawing and tracing their designs in Fontographer and selling them on major font vendors (MyFonts, Monotype) or independent ones (such as T26 and Veer). Worse still, issues of originality and plagiarism have been discussed in type design circles, but corporate entities break them routinely while trying, at the same time, to assert their rights in courts.

The difference between major and minor vendors is not substantial: though distributors like Veer try to create a community and improve on the users’ and designers’ experience through research, designer spotlights and support. Despite these efforts, digital typefaces are still regarded in an esoteric limbo between metal characters and abstract data. And though the price tags have steadily declined (and recently stabilised around the 20 dollar range in general), it is revealing that despite business models such as iTunes or Flickr, collaborative methods in producing typefaces (many typographers are still lone workers) haven’t yet developed, and file formats have changed so little in the face of recent, sleeker solutions like XML and SVG. There’s little hope for innovation: the Adobe-Macromedia and Monotype-Linotype mergers have paved the ground for a corporate monoculture ruled by software and typeface vendors and distributors, with very little margin for competition.

We can also point a mutual apathy between commercial developers and designers as a possible reason – type designers try to adapt to outdated ways – file formats and type tools – to create their works, while developers lag in keeping up to date to new breakthroughs. Limiting the tools is limiting the imagination.

On the other hand, font vendors have an incredibly contradictory stance regarding font rights, using copyright law to protect their products while violating it to borrow from others’. The different fate of Arial and Segoe begs the question: are the vendors and distributors handling this as it should be handled?

This model’s obvious contradictions definitely invite serious questioning as to the legitimacy and validity of the current type market and business model, which cannot effectively release its standards and technology because of the threat of competition. It is therefore left to users, designers and independent developers to shape a new way of defining type and creating effective communication channels between providers and users, be it through online communities or real world discussion in type designer’s circles and colleges.

If type design takes the free/open source route – and the wheels are already in motion – how can type vendors sustain their profit margins and their markets? With open fonts and free font editing software around, there would be little doubt that typography can take a very interesting turn. Could we also see the open approach and the business approach coexist, catering to specific users’ needs, whether amateur or professional? And, finally, will the type world come to terms with the fact that appropriation and use of other’s ideas have defined the activity since its beginnings, and that it implies a serious rethinking of concepts such as authorship, plagiarism and author’s rights?

  1. Friedl: Typography: An encyclopedic survey of type design and techniques through history, Black Dog & Leventhal, London, 1998. p.409
  2. Arial is now a “standard” font of web typography, being part of a very limited set of fonts that most browsers can read.
  3. Smeijers, Fred: Type Now, Hyphen Press, London, 2003. p.25
  4. ibid. p.40
  5. ibid. p.32
  6. Bringhurst, Robert: The Elements of Typographic Style, Hartley & Marks, Vancouver, 2002. p.309