I'm researching font management to help define a role for higher management.
But I'm also interested from an ethical standpoint:
– Should this be a dedicated font management role (e.g. Pearson, Penguin Random House, maybe others?);
– Should this role is a subset of an asset / permissions management role? Pros and cons;
– Should this role be undertaken by a member of the type community? Pros and cons.
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That said, if the person is also serving as a broader consultant on font purchasing, and not just licensing per se, a lot of other knowledge could come into play. An understanding of Unicode, languages and character sets, font embedding... all sorts of things.
I've never had any reason to think that the digital librarians do an inferior job and I would imagine that it's harder to make an entire job out of just managing fonts.
Pretty much everything I learned came from teaching myself by talking to type designers and foundries, reading whatever books I could get my hands on, tinkering with FontLab and by directly engaging with the type community on Typophile and more rarely in person. With two young children I find that I do not have the time or energy I had previously to fully engage online but I am no less excited by type.
For me the job has emerged alongside the large-scale adoption of digital workflows in publishing and is equal parts license compliance, problem-solving, type design (really basic stuff) and guidance on the issues Thomas mentioned above; but particularly digital usage, embedding, Unicode and languages. I have always loved the community that exists around type, both in terms of the type community and the designers and developers that use it but I was lucky to find this position and completely by chance at first.
What kind of workflows do you have for license compliance? For example, we have a list of 5,000 fonts which we broadly license for print and PDF.
Sorry, I completely missed this!
It sounds like you have a very similar set-up to us, with font management (FEX) used to manage desktop deployment and fairly expansive licensing in place to cover extended rights for digital usage (PDF, other ebook formats, web platform and app embedding) as well self-hosting rights for web fonts. Compliance reporting is conducted within specific business areas.
We also have a limited amount of 3rd party licensing but we are increasingly trying to move away from it.