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Comment by browningstreet | Hacker News Reader

Not every thing on the Internet needs its own font.

(I say as the former head of a type foundry.)

I forget when this has been discussed before but a lot of major digital companies (Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, etc.) end up creating their own fonts for legitimate business reasons that are totally unrelated to design/usability. I can't seem to find the reference, but I think it had to do with licensing/commercial reasons.

A lot of font foundries switched from one-time lump-sum payments to pay-per-use, thinking they’d make a whole bunch of money from the scale of big digital companies, and not realizing this would just cause these companies to design their own fonts instead. Really short-sighted IMO.

From your description it looks to me like the foundry industry moved from one-time lump-sum for everyone, to one-time lump-sum (font designing cost) for some rich companies, and pay-per-use for everyone else.

Was it effectively a bad move ?

Adobe is kind of an outlier there since some of their earliest commercial products were fonts.

The number of fonts we have says more about the copyright industry than anything else.

Well, no wonder you are former head of a type foundry. Gotta push ya product harder :-P

I have stories. Believe you.. me.

I was just a bit of tongue in cheek. But who can refuse a good story if you wish to share :-)

Yeah but the gumshoe designers and marketing droids getting hired say they do!

Nope, but major brands benefit from their own typeface in numerous ways, so Twitter may need their own typeface.

How so?

Branding! And licensing costs, design, UI consistency, obvious reasons covered by Apple and Google when they updated their platforms to use them.

Primarily, any license fees your don't have to pay for billions of per-use occurrences is money saved. In Twitter's case: that's a lot of money.

But there's of course also the whole "Your honor, as the evidence makes plain, this content/communication is claimed to have originated on Twitter, but does not use our official typeface. We move to dismiss this case/be awarded damages based on the fact that we were not part of this particular incident", paired with "Your honor, as the evidence makes plain, this content uses our proprietary font, but did not originate at twitter. We move to dismiss this case because we were not involved/be awarded damages on the basis us defamation and will be filing a counter-suit for impersonation".

That or brand managers want branding.

Do you have real-world examples of the hypothetical you invented?

There was that incident a while back where a bunch of government leaks were outed as fake because they were printed with a (default MS Word) font that was not available or in use when the document was purportedly created

Then Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif tried to cover up a scandal that was revealed in the Panama papers back in 2014. He forged a document purportedly from 2006 using Microsoft's not-yet-released font Calibri as an attempted cover story.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/not-for-the-firs...

I'm sure you know this, but for others: This is a cost-saving move.

It's always more economical for a company of Twitter's size to develop their own font because 1) Then they don't have to pay per-use licensing fees, which are huge at the billion user scale, and 2) a peculiarity of copyright law means that the actual shapes of the letters aren't actually protectable by copyright -- you can copy an existing font virtually 100%, tweak a thing or two, and legally call it your own.

> a peculiarity of copyright law means that the actual shapes of the letters aren't actually protectable by copyright

Warning: offer not applicable in UK and most countries in EEA. They have the concept of protecting designs there. Japan excludes most designs of fonts because of its utilitarian use BUT if the font (technically typeface) is distinctive and used in a way that can be defended as an artistic choice, it's protected under copyright.

They were using built in system fonts on each platform before.

I would very much like to return to this sunshine state of mind.

I don't think this is accurate.

If they're just specifying a font (e.g. 'Helvetica') in their CSS, it's loaded from the users' machine and doesn't cost anything.

Otherwise every site on the internet would be paying fees for fonts.

I could be wrong. Please inform me if I am.

That's obviously true for system-provided fonts but fonts like Helvetica Neue aren't typically available on any platform by default and has to be loaded in...

> a peculiarity of copyright law means that the actual shapes of the letters aren't actually protectable by copyright -- you can copy an existing font virtually 100%, tweak a thing or two, and legally call it your own.

IANAL but this is only true in some jurisdictions, primarily the US and Japan.

Also, I don’t think it’s quite that simple either. The actual type face may not be eligible for copyright, but the computer code describing the particular curves and hinting rules and etc. is. So I think you can’t just trivially copy a font and modify it and call it your own.

By “copy a font” they likely mean recreating it. If one is working from a printed specimen in the US, such activity is legal.

Why not try, though? First and foremost, I think it's a good thing that designers are getting work. I also think huge "for fun" webapps are in a particularly advantageous place when it comes to pushing the boundaries of design, mostly because they have people on hand who can do it and who probably want to do it. Next, it's really a low risk preposition.

Maybe Office 365 needs to be conservative with fonts. Twitter can push boundaries, though. I wish they'd push boundaries more, ala Bertone or Memphis Group, but I guess the risks are larger the more you push the boundaries.

Twitter's chirp webfont is almost 100k. On optimized sites, that can easily be larger then all of the HTML/CSS combined.

But tens to even hundreds of times smaller than any single tweet that has an image in it, so not really a useful metric.

That attitude is why web pages have gotten so bloated.

https://twitter.com/Twitter is 1.6mb. (200k+ of fonts, 500k+ of JS)

Actually webbloatscore.com says 2,062 kB and 88 requests.

And heaven forbid browser caches frequently used sites, which would make that complaint an equally meaningless metric.

> "Maybe Office 365 needs to be conservative with fonts. Twitter can push boundaries, though."

What's the difference between Office and Twitter here? Both are apps that should just get out of the way of the content.

Most software should just have native UI that follows the platform guidelines. Unfortunately software companies hire graphic designers who know nothing about interaction design, and generalist programmers who want to do one-size-fits-all UIs. And that's how you get unreadable fonts in slow Electron apps.

Why not try? Because the cognitive dissonance when people's eyes and brains run into a large variety web-based and app-based screen fonts. Web based font performance is still terrible. So.. because: the brain doesn't like it.

Different presentation fonts in web pages, desktops, etc. can start to have the experiential impact of (gui) skins, or non-standard dotfiles.

Please note the things I'm leaving out of this... print, books, static things, etc.

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