I wonder if repurposing/reusing of previous projects in new projects is the case.
- How often do you start from scratch or/and repurpose fonts you have already done?
- If you repurpose which parts of the project? e.g. contours, components, metrics, kerning, etc.
- Did you repurpose fonts from someone else? If yes, from whom, where and which features?
- If you didn't ever repurpose anything, why not?
Comments
The exceptions being revivals of 1900 fonts, scanned and digitized.
Why reuse or repurpose existing fonts? There are tons and tons of fonts already existing. And for all kinds of use, text, advertising, titles, etc. All kinds of styles too.
If I have a look at my 1981 Letraset catalogue, there were already hundreds and hundreds of fonts available. And most have been professionnaly digitized.
IMHO; nobody really needs an umpteenth repurposing of Caslonesque, Helveticesque or Bodoniesque fonts.
Be original, Filip !
However, I find that corporate clients who ask for custom designs generally want something that looks a lot like something else.
In that case, it’s easier for me to adapt a previous design that I can transform to look like what they have in mind.
It helps that I have a lot of stuff on hand, in all kinds of genres.
For instance, I was asked to design a contrasty sans, so I chopped the serifs off an oldstyle of mine. It wasn’t quite that simple, as a fair amount of tweaking was involved to make it not look too much like an oldstyle with the serifs chopped off.
The big advantage was that I didn’t have to conceptualize the metrics from scratch.
And it’s often easier to transform a set of glyphs than draw them from scratch.
And fundamentally, when the whole myriad of interconnecting relationships between characters already exists, and one is familiar with the proportional architecture, it’s easier to imagine how changes will ripple through that, than building all those relationships from scratch.
I’ve also done jobs in which starting from another design was part of the brief. The Sanskrit Text font that Fiona Ross and I made for Microsoft was directly based on Monotype Devanagari and Bembo—to which Microsoft have ‘ownership-like rights’—and we started from the outlines of those fonts.
As a conceptual framework, not too different from the metafont and font editing software with modules for PANOSE categories such as contrast, serif style and x-height.
What might be the reason for a client to order a font that is not so original? Why would they order a font that "already exist" instead of purchasing it directly?
Vernon Adams R.I.P. made Tienne by remixing Noto Serif and Artifika, iirc
1. Because it may be less expensive to commission a clone for a one-time payment, rather than an enterprise-wide renewable licence for an existing typeface.
2. Because they have developed their branding using an existing font as a placeholder, but would now like to fine-tune the concept with a custom design.
And I certainly wouldn't use someone else's. Way too many chances for running into potential hot water.
It depends on who the client is, and how smart (=thinking about Net Present Value in accounting/economic terms) the foundry is.
For a client like an art director of a magazine (or many kinds of media), an exclusivity period of two years or five years at the very most might be enough to extract nearly all the value they get from exclusivity. Part of this is because the art director is likely to have moved on. Perhaps part is because after a few years nobody is paying attention to the unique typeface any more. Whatever the reasons, foundries have discovered that many clients are open to this!
On the other hand for the foundry, aside from questions of popularity that may well vary over time, it is otherwise a normal Net Present Value calculation where you discount for inflation/alternative investment at say 5% per year. (Or something.)
So, given that the client’s value for exclusivity is often (for many common clients) slanted much more heavily to the near-term than that of a rational economic-minded foundry, in such cases it is often in BOTH parties’ interest to limit the period of exclusivity. The foundry can then afford to charge the client less—enough less that it is a “better deal” in terms of their valuation of near-term exclusivity. And the foundry can “get the design back” in a few years and offer it as a regular retail product or whatever they wish to do with it, and also come out ahead.
Ironically, the company just went belly-up recently, so I have no idea who owns the font now. I'll probably fork the changes into the parent font eventually.
into an "impressionist" type
or a neon experiment (itself already a spin-off of my Feneon design)
into a groovy psychedelic thing
There may be creative pitfalls in overdependence on previous work, but I'd say there are also missed opportunities when restricting oneself to a blank canvas every time.