The awkward conversation happens after the work is approved. The identity is signed off, the site is built, and somebody asks whether the font is licensed for what the client is about to do with it. Usually it is not, because the licence that covered making the artwork is not the licence that covers publishing it.
This is a description of how commercial font licences are normally structured. It is not legal advice, and the terms vary between foundries — the point is knowing which questions to ask.
The four licences behind one typeface
- Desktop. Installing the font and making artwork with it. Sold per seat — per person, sometimes per machine. This is what you buy first and it usually covers nothing below.
- Web. Serving the font file from a website. Very commonly capped by monthly page views, so a campaign that succeeds can put the client out of licence.
- App. Embedding the font in software you distribute. Often priced per application and per platform, and frequently the most expensive of the four.
- Broadcast and ePub. Video, television and embedded documents. A separate purchase again, and the one most often forgotten until a launch film is in edit.
Who has to hold the licence
Generally the party doing the thing the licence permits. If the client publishes the website, the client needs the web licence — you cannot cover them with yours. If a printer sets the annual report, the printer needs a seat. If an agency later takes the identity on, they need seats too.
That is the hidden cost of a licensed typeface in an identity: it is not one purchase, it is a purchase repeated by every party who touches the brand, forever. Clients rarely understand this at the point of approving a font, and the conversation lands on you.
Where open fonts change the arithmetic
A font under the SIL Open Font License has no seat count, no page-view cap, no renewal and no separate web, app or broadcast tier. You can install it, serve it, embed it in an application you sell, put it in a film, and hand the file to the client with their brand package. What the OFL allows goes through the terms and the two real conditions.
This is why open fonts have moved from a budget compromise to a deliberate choice in a lot of studios. It is not that they are free; it is that the identity works everywhere on day one and keeps working when the client hires somebody else.
The questions to ask before you specify a font
- Where will this be published — print, web, an app, video? Each is a separate licence on a commercial face.
- Who publishes it? That is who needs the licence, and it is usually not you.
- What is the web tier capped at, and what happens when the client exceeds it?
- Does the client have an in-house team or an agency who will also need seats?
- Is the font going into a brand package that will be handed on? If so, can it legally be?
If the answer to several of those is uncomfortable, the alternatives section here lists open faces that stand in for the commonly specified commercial ones — matched on the shapes that decide whether a substitution reads right, rather than on the name. Free Helvetica alternatives works through one example in detail.
What a web licence is actually metered on
Desktop licences are usually counted in seats. Web licences are counted in something the client has no intuition for: monthly page views, sometimes per domain, sometimes across all of them. A brand that grows past its tier finds out through an invoice rather than a warning, and the designer who specified the font is the one who gets the phone call.
- Ask which domains the licence covers, including staging and the help centre — each one is often counted separately.
- Ask what happens at the cap: some foundries upgrade automatically and bill, others block the font.
- Ask whether the files may be self-hosted, or whether the foundry’s own service has to serve them. That decides whether you can control performance and privacy at all.
- Ask about apps. A native app usually needs a separate embedding licence, and so does a font baked into an ebook or a piece of software.
Handing the project over
The moment a project changes hands is where licensing goes wrong. A file copied into a shared drive is a copy nobody licensed; a logo sent as an editable file carries the font with it; a "final assets" folder tends to contain a font the client may not legally install.
- Write into the proposal who buys the licence and in whose name it is registered. It should almost always be the client’s.
- Deliver a list of the fonts used, with links, rather than the font files themselves — unless the licence permits passing them on, as the open ones here do.
- Keep proof of purchase with the project archive. Foundries do audit, and the receipt is the answer.
- For open fonts, deliver the file with its licence text alongside it. That is the whole obligation, and it is satisfied by the zip from this site as it comes.
When the client already has a brand font
Do not assume the licence stretches to the work you are doing. A brand that bought desktop seats for its marketing team has not bought a web licence, and the "we already own it" answer is how a site ships in a font nobody has the right to serve. Ask to see the licence, and if the answer is slow, design with an open face until it arrives — every family in this archive can be used commercially with no purchase to chase.