Frere-Jones is suing Hoefler for half of preeminent digital type foundry | Hacker News Reader

Frere-Jones is suing Hoefler for half of preeminent digital type foundry

qz.com

125 pointstptacek24 comments

This reminded me of the mother of all type designer business partner falling-outs:

http://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21591793-le...

One difference, of course, is that digital type can't be dumped into the Thames.

I wonder if there's a way to preserve their cloud.typography service through this. The article states that ownership of the fonts was transferred, but I imagine most designers would disdain the very idea of subscribing if the allegations turned out to be true.

Service aside, how is the company supposed to survive this? Even if Frere-Jones wins the trial and full damages are awarded, surely he'll want to leave the company. I can't fathom how you could keep collaborating with a partner who tried to scam you out of a life's work. That'd leave H&FJ with much weaker creative direction and a tarnished reputation.

Implications for cloud.typography are quite worry some. Fought to convince several agency clients to use the service in lough of image headlines -- would hate for this to affect the service or more likely its license agreement for specific faces. Not sure if cloud.typography is a separate legal entity or not which could continue to license FJ faces if there was a falling out.

> lough

I think you mean "lieu" (if you don't, it's not clear what you mean)

correct

H+FJ are in a class of their own in the world of typography, it would be a tragedy if this caused their firm's demise.

The firm's not going anywhere, but their reputation is going to suffer and that will hinder their marketing machine big time.

H+FJ are in a class of their own in the world of typography

Are they? That's a pretty insulting claim to make when you consider the achievements of other giants of the typography world. Robert Slimbach at Adobe has a similarly impressive portfolio, for example. If you look down any list of the most popular fonts for use in professional typography, Adrian Frutiger probably designed several of them. From a slightly different angle, Matthew Carter was creating screen-optimised fonts decades before all these trendy web font services with the luxuries of modern digital formats and hinting technology came along, among other significant achievements. Hermann Zapf? Carol Twombly?

H&FJ have made some very nice fonts. They've also made some so-so fonts, had much more aggressive licensing terms than most major foundries, and arrived several years late to the web fonts party. I'm sorry that their situation has reached what we're hearing about today, but please let's not spend all day indulging in hero worship.

Wow, no written contract for over ten years? This can't end well.

H+FJ have repeatedly made public statements referring to an "equal partnership". Oral contracts are enforceable. This sounds like it's going to be extremely expensive for all involved.

That was my thought too. Oral contracts can hold up, but boy would it have been cheaper and easier to have this stuff in writing.

that's at least some relief, sad that it still has to be litigated to show it's enforceable

I knew a guy who worked for a startup with no contract for over 2 years once. All in all, he received a single $1,000 check from the "founder" over the 2 years time, basically to shut him up. Then the company went ouf of business after not making the one and only sale they had been working towards the the last 2 years.

It was a fun 1.5 years of dreaming and scheming for him I suppose. Must have been disappointing when the big dirty didn't pull through.

tl;dr don't work for anybody for a significant amount of time without a contract.

Holy shit.

Court docs:

https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet...

My world is collapsing. This is like when Disney bought Lucasfilm to Star Wars geeks.

Are you kidding? I'm happy to have the Star Wars franchise out of that fool Lucas' hands.

Out of one fool's hands right into the hands of another fool, J.J. Abrams.

Your world revolves entirely around HFJ typefaces? When there are thousands of alternatives, including originals that they "re-imagined"?

Hm.

I don't think that's really fair. It's not as if Disney are going to put out a SW film, but all Disney'd up with knights and princesses and evil sorcerers and stuff instead of the hard sci-fi that... er...

Well, then, I guess they aren't as perfect as I had believed, having been misled by their incredibly perfect output.

From a quick read of the court filing, it appears Frere-Jones has the upper hand here. If everything in the filing is true, I hope he wins, big-time.

If a quick reading of the plaintiff's filings don't give you the impression that they have been deeply wronged by the evil defendant, it's a bad filing.

Whoa, this is huge.

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