The Hustle: Where do fonts come from?

Dave Crossland

https://thehustle.co/where-do-fonts-come-from

Well researched article with a broad spectrum of quotes 

Grzegorz Luk (gluk)

“[Monotype] keeps saying, [...] We are not competing with foundries [...] .”

Owner of Helvetica, Frutiger, Palatino, Avenir, Zapfino, Univers, BT Vera, BT Charter, Droid, Open Sans, Titanium, URW Corporate, URW Nimbus, URW Bodoni, URW DIN, FF DAX, FF DIN, FF Meta, Gotham Archer, Franklin ... and so on,

is not competing with foundries.

Patrick Griffin

Don't know about "well researched" there. All these articles about Monotype I've seen over the years either don't dig deep enough or just neglect to mention a crucial 15-year period of the company's history. In 1993/94 the original Monotype was on the verge of declaring bankruptcy. Microsoft swooped in and bailed them out with something like $150K in exchange for allowing any or all of the entire MT library to be embeddable in Microsoft products. Three or four years after that, Agfa bought the flailing outfit and it became Agfa Monotype. In fact, Agfa Monotype was the iteration that started the shopping spree — when they bought ITC/Letraset from Esselte in 2000. After TA Associates bought AM and renamed it Monotype Imaging in 2004, there was a supplier exodus and something of an internal rebellion. Four of the MTI guys splintered off to form Ascender, taking with them quite a few major clients like Microsoft, Google, Blackberry and a few car companies. Three years later, MTI bought Ascender for a shiny amount and serious employment concessions/guarantees to bring back the clients they'd lost. In the process of all these acquisitions they were saddled with internal redundancies and infighting, an impenetrable bureaucracy, a revolving door employee culture, and some structural shuffles that didn't make one bit of sense. The HGGC takeover simply magnified all that stuff and took the company farther from type and closer to banking. And now we're here, on the cusp of peak enshittification.

So any article tracing today's big bad wolf all the way back to Tolbert Lanston is just pure sensation. Monotype is nowhere near closely related to the Monotype that made Times Roman, not even the one that bought ITC, nor the one that bought Linotype. The name was kept within some context all these decades simply for historical cred.

Dave Crossland

Patrick Griffin said:

on the cusp of peak enshittification.

This phrase comes from https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys