A type family can take months if not years to complete. The best ones possess twin geniuses in art and engineering, in addition to an enormous amount of foresight and patience. Beyond the tired jokes about Comic Sans and Papyrus is a serious industry that takes to heart the responsibility of shaping culture pixel by pixel.įonts are conceived, drawn, and produced by skilled designers who study art, computer programming, languages, and history. To understand the gravity of H&Co’s decision to sell to Monotype, a primer on how digital typefaces are made and sold may be useful. “With every new acquisition, it gets worse for the rest of us.” It’s the future of our industry at stake and it’s never been this bad,” she tells Quartz. “I think it’s about time that I can speak more openly about this. She designed the official font for the city of Dubai, which is bundled in Microsoft Office. ![]() ![]() ![]() Chahine, who earned her PhD from Leiden University and a masters degree in International Relations from the University of Cambridge, is a legibility expert and a pioneer of Arabic typography. The impact of H&Co’s acquisition cannot be overstated, says Nadine Chahine, a celebrated Lebanese type designer and Monotype’s former UK type director. What do you think we would be watching? How much experimentation would there be? Would there be any pressure at all for this company that owns so much? It pokes right at the heart of what motivates so many of us, yet it’s exactly the thing that’s not part of their business model.” “Imagine if 70% of movie studios and TV production companies were owned by the same parent company. “The name ‘Monotype’ is a little too on the nose for what’s happening,” he observes. “Monotype is the most experienced foundry in the world, who today cares for many of the world’s most important typefaces, making them the natural home for the work we’ve created at Hoefler&Co.” He declined to comment for this story.įrere-Jones declined to comment on the sale or speculate about his former partner’s motives but also wondered about his profession’s future as Monotype becomes an even more dominant force. “For us, it was critical to partner with an organization that fundamentally believes in the value of type,” Hoefler said. In the press release about the sale, Hoefler explained that he and Borsella believed Monotype was the best home for their 32-year-old business. Prior to that, it bought FontShop, the International Typeface Corporation, Bitstream, and Linotype, which was its main competitor for years. Last year, the company acquired URW and the London-based studio Fontsmith. H&Co is hardly the first type foundry to be absorbed by Monotype. There were also some who defended Hoefler’s prerogative to steer his business however he pleases.īeyond the sale, many font makers voiced concerns about an impending Monotype monopoly-a “kraken eating up the industry,” as designer Nina Stössinger puts it. Some commiserated with Hoefler’s longtime staffers who heard about the sale at the same time the public did others debated the scruples of Hoefler and his wife, Carleen Borsella, H&Co’s CEO, who left the company as soon as the deal was finalized to “explore new creative endeavors,” as the press release indicated. But the prospect of seeing the industry’s licensing practices streamlined was of little comfort to designers who flocked to social media and online fora like Type Drawers to process the shock of the H&Co sale. “A small foundry writes its own end-user license agreement, sometimes with legal counsel, sometimes without. “It just makes it easier for the customer,” he explains, drawing an analogy between font use and software licensing. ![]() To see H&Co gobbled up by Monotype was a great blow felt by solo practitioners and small studios, who worry that a profit-driven corporation is increasingly dictating the terms and conditions of how their work is priced and distributed.Ĭharles Nix, a creative type director at Monotype, says that bringing H&Co’s assets under the company’s e-commerce umbrella simplifies the process of browsing and buying fonts. H&Co was a bastion of independent type design, a practice that was as innovative as it was profitable amid competition from giants like Monotype and Adobe Fonts, as well as the proliferation of free typefaces on Google Fonts. Now, the acquisition of H&Co by an industry giant with private-equity owners is lighting up the industry, and raising existential concerns for others in the field. And lawyers and graphic design nerds may recall the 2014 million-dollar legal battle (and settlement) between Hoefler and his former business partner Tobias Frere-Jones-still the most publicized controversy in the relatively mellow world of digital font-making. H&Co’s name might ring a bell for those who saw the episode of the Netflix series Abstract featuring its founder, Jonathan Hoefler.
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