Choosing a typeface, and what the licence actually says

Four questions, before any aesthetic judgement

Most typeface selection goes wrong before taste enters, because a face was chosen for how a heading looked and then asked to do a job it was not drawn for. Four questions filter out most mistakes:

1. How many weights and styles does it have? A family with Regular and Bold gives you one weight step. A family with 300 through 800 plus italics gives you a hierarchy without a second typeface. This single question eliminates more candidates than any other.
2. Does it have real italics? A true italic is a separate design with a cursive skeleton, not a slanted roman. If the family has no italic file, browsers and word processors will synthesise one by shearing the letters, and it looks like exactly what it is.
3. What scripts and characters does it cover? If any of your content will be in Hindi, Tamil, Urdu or Bengali, or contains currency symbols, mathematical signs or accented names, check before committing. Missing glyphs fall back to another font mid-word.
4. What are the figures like? Does it have tabular numerals for tables? Does it distinguish 0 from O?

Only then look at whether you like it.

Text faces and display faces

A display face is drawn for large sizes: fine detail, tight default spacing, dramatic contrast, sometimes very short descenders. At 15 pixels it falls apart. A text face is drawn for small sizes: sturdier strokes, open apertures, generous spacing, and it looks bland and slightly wide when you blow it up.

This is not a hierarchy of quality. It is a specification. Using a display face for body text is the commonest typographic error in first projects, and it is usually made by someone who picked the face from a specimen shown at 90 pixels.

Where to get good type free

The free landscape is genuinely good now, and several of these are used in professional work daily.

• Google Fonts — over 1,500 families, nearly all under the SIL Open Font Licence, downloadable for local use as well as served from the CDN.
• Fontshare, from the Indian Type Foundry — high-quality families free for commercial use, with much stronger Indic coverage than most Western sources.
• Ek Type — a Mumbai foundry releasing open-licensed Devanagari and multi-script families, including Mukta.
• Velvetyne and The League of Moveable Type — smaller, more experimental, all open.
• Open Foundry — a curated index of open-licensed faces with proper specimens.
• The system font stack — costs zero bytes, renders natively, and is what most operating systems' own interfaces use.

The paid industry names are worth knowing because job advertisements name them: Monotype, Linotype, Hoefler, Commercial Type, Klim. You do not need any of them to do good work, and a great deal of professional work is set in Inter, Source Sans or IBM Plex.

Licensing, plainly and honestly

A font is software, and you are licensed to use it under specific terms. The main categories:

• SIL Open Font Licence (OFL). Free to use commercially, embed, modify and redistribute. Two real conditions: you may not sell the font on its own, and if you modify a font you must rename it if the original carries a Reserved Font Name. This covers most of Google Fonts.
• Apache 2.0. Used by some Google-released families such as Roboto. Similar permissions, different formalities.
• Commercial desktop licences. Usually cover installing the font on a set number of machines for producing artwork. They frequently do not cover embedding the font in a website, an app or a PDF sent to a client. Web use is typically a separate licence sold by pageview.

The practical trap: a font that came with your operating system or with a piece of design software is licensed for your use of that software, not for redistribution. Handing a client a logo file with the font outlined is fine; handing them the font file is usually not.

Where it is genuinely unsettled. Whether a typeface design can be protected at all differs by country. In the United States the letterform designs themselves are generally not copyrightable while the font software is, which is why lookalike fonts are legal there. In much of Europe a typeface design can be registered and protected. There is no single global answer, the boundaries are litigated rather than settled, and this is not legal advice — if a project's budget depends on it, ask a lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction.

The related question of whether typefaces in a training set create rights in generated letterforms is newer and less settled still. Anybody telling you it is resolved is describing one jurisdiction's current position as though it were the world's.

The default that is hard to beat

If you do not have a reason for a particular face: one well-drawn sans with many weights, for everything, with the size scale and spacing doing the work. It is not a compromise. A great deal of the best interface typography of the last decade is exactly this.