Yesterday, when asked how much the Treasury had spent on licensing fonts since 1997, John Healey simply repsonded with, "this information is not available." Now I don't know what it costs to license a font, and in fact there is quite a debate going on across the Internet about the valdiity of copyrighting fonts in general.
However, whilst the Treasury says it doesn't have the information available to answer the question, it doesn't deny it's licensed fonts. Does anyone know what fonts it has licensed, and in particular why? After all, what's wrong with sans-serif or some other freebie font* ? It's not like the Treasury is an international brand.
* this excludes the use of comic sans which is evil.
8 comments:
"Sans serif" is a descriptive name for fonts rather than a font itself. Arial is a sans serif font, as is Helvetica.
Times is a serif font, namely that it has non structural details on the strokes of some letters.
You are right though, Comic Sans is evil
The common way to license would be by font family which would include light, regular, bold, extra-bold weights of a single font (eg Frutiger) in normal and condensed versions in both roman and italic. Typically £150-£200 for use on up to five PCs and one printer.
Work up to an enterprise licence from there. It could easily be in the same order of magnitude as the corporate windows licence especially as most corporate brand definitions would include at least two font families (a serif and a sans-serif) if not more.
Of course, it gets really interesting if you commission a custom font as part of your corporate brand - as many internationals would.
I don`t know what a font is . I`m pretty sure it isn`t what I think it is , in this context.
Not my moment to dip a nervous toe into the Dizzy pool perhaps
*scampers back to changing room*
brrr
Hang on it is what I thought it was
Its not going well is it
When the Lib Dems last changed the party logo, the font was also changed to one that had to be paid for. The party only bought 500 licenses at the time. There was something of a rurore before the party changed the rules to allow a gneric font that was an almost exact match, but it is a similar example of incompetence, which at least the Lib Dems left behind some 7 yeas ago.
But surely this government proves that Comic Sans has it's place. Can't you see how wonderful it would be if all government legislation were printed in comic sans with a bit of cheap clip art thrown in?
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