When branding (or rebranding) an organisation, type decisions play an important part in communicating that organisation's personality, values, and individuality – and using a unique typeface is exceptionally powerful. Unfortunately, choosing a typeface is not always a simple decision once licensing comes into the picture.
The Cost of it All
Typefaces are available for all sorts of budgets, however, many typefaces will quickly exceed £500 for just a handful of users, very few website views, and no option to use them in an app. This may not be a problem if you’re a start-up with very few staff members, but if you run a large organisation, or plan on growing in the future, these costs can easily skyrocket.
As an extreme example, Airbnb has roughly 110M monthly site visits, an app, and over 6,000 employees. This could see them exceed £250,000 in licence fees for a type family. From a financial point of view, its simple to see why the company commissioned its custom typeface, Cereal.
They’re not alone either, as large organisations such as the BBC, Netflix, and Youtube have all recently commissioned custom type families.
Commissioning a type family gives these large companies better ownership of how the font files are used internally and externally, being able to be shared with external teams and freelancers when needed, and other uses that normally require additional licenses.
Purchasing fewer licenses than needed is something that some businesses feel they can get away with, but large font foundries and vendors are known to look for unlicensed uses of fonts and issue penalties. As the owner of a type family, this issue can be avoided completely.
Getting Creative
There are creative reasons to commission a type family too. For starters, custom fonts can be tailored to your organisation's specific needs, such as language support, accessibility features, and more. This can be a great solution for organisations that serve multiple markets and may struggle to find a typeface that embodies the brand personality and provides the features needed.
Additionally, the minimum character sets required by many online vendors do not always include glyphs that appear in non-anglophone Latin languages, and unless specific attention is paid to the glyphs included in a font that is purchased, problems may appear at a later date.
Additionally, custom typefaces will be designed and created in collaboration with your internal brand, marketing, and design teams to specifically align with the values, tone of voice, and look and feel that your brand is looking to achieve. This approach means that it’s much easier to embed a personality into a typeface that is wholly unique to a brand.
Producing a Custom Type Family
When it comes to production, the creation of typefaces has changed significantly over the last few decades, with advancements in software enabling large families to be created quicker and more efficiently.
Using font masters, several weights can be interpolated without the need for each one to be drawn individually. This makes expanded families with condensed and extended weights more achievable on a budget than ever before. Of course, it’s also possible to draw all of these weights if necessary or if the budget allows for it.
It is these “masters" that will form the basis for the cost of the project, and drawing and amending these will form the backbone of the project after an initial stage of research and planning that gathers all of the required features needed from the type family.
The price of these masters will vary on style and complexity.
If we return to our previous example of Airbnb, it’s likely that an organisation of that size requires an incredibly robust, language-heavy type family, which may be costed at £15,000 per master. For a three master type family (Using “light”, “regular”, and “heavy”) the project would have an overall cost of £45,000. That sounds like a lot, but it’s far less than the £250,000 or more that they could be paying in license fees.
Summary
If your business or organisations spends a lot of money licensing typefaces, it may be more cost effective to develop a custom typeface that addresses your specific business needs.
If you’d be interested in finding out how we could help, we’ll be happy to have a chat about your requirements.
