From Quartz, October 23:
A famous type foundry’s sale to a PE-backed giant has rattled the font industry
To outsiders, it seemed like a straightforward sale.
On Sept 15, Monotype, the world’s largest font seller, acquired Hoefler&Co (H&Co), a New York-based foundry perhaps best known for a font called Gotham, famously used by Barack Obama’s 2008 US presidential campaign. With the deal, Monotype acquired the intellectual property rights to the studio’s entire library of typefaces, along with the highly desirable URL typography.com, and a team of designers and support staff.
H&Co’s name might ring a bell for those who saw the episode of the Netflix series Abstract featuring its founder, Jonathan Hoefler. And lawyers and graphic design nerds may recall the 2014 million-dollar legal battle (and settlement) between Hoefler and his former business partner Tobias Frere-Jones—still the most publicized controversy in the relatively mellow world of digital font-making.
Now, the acquisition of H&Co by an industry giant with private-equity owners is lighting up the industry, and raising existential concerns for others in the field.
H&Co was a bastion of independent type design, a practice that was as innovative as it was profitable amid competition from giants like Monotype and Adobe Fonts, as well as the proliferation of free typefaces on Google Fonts. To see H&Co gobbled up by Monotype was a great blow felt by solo practitioners and small studios, who worry that a profit-driven corporation is increasingly dictating the terms and conditions of how their work is priced and distributed.
Brands with ties to Monotype or H&Co fonts.
Charles Nix, a creative type director at Monotype, says that bringing H&Co’s assets under the company’s e-commerce umbrella simplifies the process of browsing and buying fonts. “It just makes it easier for the customer,” he explains, drawing an analogy between font use and software licensing. “A small foundry writes its own end-user license agreement, sometimes with legal counsel, sometimes without. They all differ wildly, which is crazy.”
Perhaps so. But the prospect of seeing the industry’s licensing practices streamlined was of little comfort to designers who flocked to social media and online fora like Type Drawers to process the shock of the H&Co sale. Some commiserated with Hoefler’s longtime staffers who heard about the sale at the same time the public did; others debated the scruples of Hoefler and his wife, Carleen Borsella, H&Co’s CEO, who left the company as soon as the deal was finalized to “explore new creative endeavors,” as the press release indicated. There were also some who defended Hoefler’s prerogative to steer his business however he pleases.
Beyond the sale, many font makers voiced concerns about an impending Monotype monopoly—a “kraken eating up the industry,” as designer Nina Stössinger puts it. H&Co is hardly the first type foundry to be absorbed by Monotype. Last year, the company acquired URW and the London-based studio Fontsmith. Prior to that, it bought FontShop, the International Typeface Corporation, Bitstream, and Linotype, which was its main competitor for years.
Belief in the value of type....
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