All About Font Licensing And Font Usage Rights 

Font licensing doesn’t need to be intimidating. The best practices for font license compliance and font usage rights are practically universal. Whether you’re an independent designer or working in creative operations, the same rules apply to all members of a creative team. 
  
Fonts are the digital form of typefaces. While a typeface is purely design, a font is software that allows designers to integrate that typeface into various forms of media. Fonts don’t simply appear out of nowhere. Every font was created by an independent type designer or foundry. (Some may argue that AI is changing that, but for now let’s just speak to the status quo).  
 

Before using a font, you should always license it directly from the type designer, font foundry, or from a reputable retailer. Using a font without a license or without the correct license can lead to legal disputes. That’s why it’s important to be diligent about font license usage and appropriate font licensing choices for all your projects. 
 
Before we dive into our font licensing best practices, let’s look at the three core issues that often lead to issues with font usage rights. 

Font Licensing Challenges For Designers, Brands, And Agencies

Font license compliance isn’t always straightforward, and many creative professionals either underestimate its nuance or feel wholly intimidated by it. Most people are initially introduced to fonts while working in a word processor for the first time, which can be as early as childhood. Font licensing never even crosses most people’s minds, unless they need to apply fonts to commercial uses like publishing.  
  
Of course, once you learn that fonts should be associated with proper licenses—or that what you’re really buying is the license—you strive to follow font licensing best practices, especially for fonts in commercial use and production. However, things can get muddy when you’re dealing with fonts, especially at scale. Here are the three main challenges of staying within font license terms for creative projects.  

1. Free fonts often have strings attached (and other problems)

It's not uncommon for less seasoned or junior designers to seek out free fonts. After all, acquiring font licenses to build a collection can be expensive. However, many free fonts have a caveat in their licensing — they are not to be used in commercial projects. Unless the font EULA (End User License Agreement) clearly states that it can be used across commercial, social, print, packaging, and everything in between, the smart move is to assume that there is a catch. 
  
It's also important to note that many fonts that type designers choose to “give away” and not charge for often have issues. Glyph problems, kerning problems, and inconsistency betray these fonts as not being skillfully produced. As is often the case, “you get what you pay (or don’t pay) for.” 

2. Fonts cannot enforce their own licensing terms

As technology has become more advanced, so too has people’s expectation of it. So many forms of software restrict user actions now. For example, Netflix prevents viewers from taking screenshots while viewing, and iPhone applications force users to purchase access to higher-tier features. 
  
However, unlike other forms of software, fonts simply cannot enforce their own terms. The flexible nature of fonts is intrinsic to how they work in operating systems. This means that once you have a font, you often can use it in ways not covered by the license.  
  
There are no warning windows that pop up or notifications to upgrade your font license. This means that unless you have the terms of a font license memorized, it’s very easy to cross a line down the road and use the font in a way not covered by the license you purchased. Proactive font license management is essential to ensuring you don’t violate font licensing terms in projects. 

3. Trouble at scale

If you’re only ever dealing with one or two fonts, these issues might be easy to control. In fact, this is why so many huge brands turn to corporate font licensing—a stable, universal font license that is owned entirely by the brand reduces noncompliance risk and creative process problems. But for most designers and other creatives, this is simply not the case. 
From what we’ve observed, the average creative team has around 4,500 fonts in their collection. Discrepancies between font use and font license terms are often inevitable if a single spreadsheet is holding the weight of this high-volume world for project reviews. 

Font Licensing Best Practices 

Now that you know why font licensing can be complicated, let’s look at a few best practices that can maintain better font license compliance for all your projects. 

1. When In Doubt, Reach Out

If you’re not sure which license to purchase or exactly what’s covered in a EULA for a font you’ve already licensed, we recommend proactively reaching out to the font foundry directly. It’s better to have confidence in your choice (and a written record) than to deal with embarrassment and legal problems down the road.  

2. Implement Strong And Clear Guidelines

Hundreds or even thousands creative projects can move through busy creative teams each year. We recommend having clear policies in place around designers bringing in fonts from their personal collections, how project reviews are conducted, and who is responsible for recording and updating fonts licenses (whether that’s in a spreadsheet or a more automated tool like Connect + Insight.) 

3. Review And Cross-Check

It’s not uncommon for an under-licensed font to sneak into a project. The most important thing is to catch it before that project goes live. Project reviews are crucial, and we would argue that implementing project reviews at multiple points across your creative process (a.k.a. creative operations)— instead of just the very beginning or very end—is much more effective for catching font usage violations, and it will benefit licensing for other media assets as well (stock image and video, for example).  
  
If your team is using spreadsheets to cross-reference, it’s also important to periodically double-check that the information in the spreadsheet accurately reflects new font license purchases or updates to existing licenses.  

4. Read The Fine Print 

Font licensing isn’t black and white. Many foundries take different approaches to licensing categories and pricing. It’s important to not assume that a “basic commercial license” from Foundry A covers the same thing as a “basic commercial license” from Foundry B. There’s a lot of nuance in this space. Instead of resisting it, we recommend leaning into it (and maybe even nerding out a little bit). This interview with Joyce Ketterer is a great place to start: