When Does Redrawing a Typeface Become Theft?

Most of designers likely have experience this: a client asking us to draw a wordmark that looked like a typeface they admired, but different enough that they would not have to license it. That request is actually much more complexed than it seems because it has a legal answer and an ethical answer, and they are not the same.

Redrawing a font is legal in the United States. Typeface designs are not covered by copyright, so you may study an existing face and draw your own version of it. Copying the font file is a separate act, and that one is not legal. The law permits the redrawing. It does not tell you when redrawing becomes theft.

What the law protects, and what it leaves open

The copyright mechanics are settled, and we covered them in can you copyright a typeface. The short version: the design is a functional form and is not protected, the font file is software and is.

Two other doors are open, and most designers do not know about either.

Typeface designs can be patented. According to the USPTO's Manual of Patent Examining Procedure, section 1505, design patents filed on or after May 13, 2015 run fifteen years from the date of grant. This is not exotic. Adobe, Apple, Google, and Samsung all hold design patents on type fonts, and the first US design patent ever issued, in 1842, covered a typeface by George Bruce.

Names are protected separately, as trademarks. You may redraw Helvetica. You may not release your redrawing and call it Helvetica.

So the legal picture is narrow. Unless a specific face carries a live design patent, redrawing it is lawful. That is the whole of the protection, and it is why the interesting question is not a legal one.

Revival is a tradition with a five-hundred-year record

Adobe Garamond is the example that settles whether redrawing can be honorable, because nobody has ever argued it wasn't.

Adobe describes it as the company's first historical revival: a digital interpretation of the roman types of Claude Garamond and the italic types of Robert Granjon, released in 1989 and drawn by Robert Slimbach. Garamond cut his originals in Paris in the mid-1500s. Granjon was his contemporary.

Look at what the work actually required. Slimbach traveled to the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp in 1988 with Fred Brady, Joy Redick, and the type historian John Lane to photograph the surviving Garamond and Granjon punches, then worked from enlargements of those photographs. Adobe's own account of the project describes the face being redrawn from scratch several times as better source material came in.

That is a redrawing of someone else's typeface. It is also one of the most respected pieces of type design of the last forty years. Whatever separates theft from revival, it is not the act of redrawing.

Three questions the law will not answer for you

The field has to draw this line, because the statute won't. Three questions, in order:

  1. Did you go to the source, or to the file? Opening someone's OTF in a font editor and dragging points is not a revival. It is tracing with extra steps. Slimbach went to Antwerp.
  2. Is the designer alive and selling it? Garamond died in 1561. A face released last spring is somebody's rent. Legality is identical in both cases. The consequence is not.
  3. Would you name your source in the specimen? This is the one that decides.

The tell is the colophon. A revival announces its debt, because the debt is the point: Adobe Garamond puts the source in the name and the history in the marketing copy. A knockoff goes quiet about where it came from. If you would be uncomfortable printing the sentence "this is based on ___" in your own specimen, you already know what you did.

Try this before you ship it

Open the face you admire and the one you drew at 200 percent, side by side, one letter at a time. For every glyph, name the departure and the reason for it. Terminal cut shorter for small sizes. Counter opened for a coated stock. If you cannot state a reason for a single letter, you did not revive anything, you retyped it. This is how the profession settles the question, not legal advice, and the law outside the United States is not the same law.

That exercise is the whole argument in miniature. A revival is a sequence of decisions made in front of a source you can name. A knockoff is the absence of those decisions, hidden behind a file nobody checked. The letterforms may end up close either way. Only one of them is yours.

Frequently asked questions

Is it legal to copy a font? Copying the font file is not legal, because font software is protected as software. Redrawing the design yourself is legal in the United States, because typeface designs are not covered by copyright.

Can you get sued for redrawing a typeface? You can, if the face carries a live design patent or if your version uses the original's trademarked name. Absent those, redrawing a typeface design in the United States is lawful.

What is the difference between a typeface revival and a knockoff? A revival works from the original source, names it, and can justify every departure from it. A knockoff works from the existing font file and does not disclose where the shapes came from.

C.J. Yeh is a founder and ECD at Cynda Media Lab and a co-founder of DSGN BY D. He is also a tenured professor and curriculum chair of Creative Technology and Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Sources

  • Manual of Patent Examining Procedure, section 1505, "Term of Design Patent," United States Patent and Trademark Office. https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s1505.html
  • "Types of Protection for Font and Typeface Designs," Sterne Kessler, 2017. https://www.sternekessler.com/news-insights/insights/types-protection-font-and-typeface-designs/
  • Adobe Garamond Pro, typeface description, Adobe Fonts. https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/adobe-garamond-pro
  • "The Adobe Originals Silver Anniversary Story," Typekit Blog, Adobe, 2014. https://blog.typekit.com/2014/06/12/the-adobe-originals-silver-anniversary-story-stone-slimbach-and-twombly-launch-the-first-originals/
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