Can I licence my font for a single job?

Bendy18 June 2009 · 01:52

Dear Typophiles,

I've been working on my font Mint and my company is interested in licensing a beta version of it for the logo, so only a small subset of the glyphs will be used. My company is paying a design agency to create the whole logo including graphics and text. If we ask the agency to use Mint, I have two questions.

1 Am I licensing the font to the agency or to my company? Should I charge?

2 What sort of licence would be best? I haven't written one before so I just want something very quick and easy. I want them to use it only for this logo as the font is still being tweaked and is not yet released. I guess I can write any kind of licence I want?

All advice gratefully welcomed.

Thanks :)

Bendy18 June 2009 · 05:44

What?

Bert Vanderveen18 June 2009 · 06:58

Spam, Bendy. The curse of the Internet...

. . .
Bert Vanderveen BNO

Si_Daniels18 June 2009 · 11:02

>I’ve been working on my font Mint and my company

If you're under contract they may already have certain rights around work you do, even if you do it in your own time. So I would be inclined to not play hardball with them. Why not provide the logo outlined? That might avoid all the complicated licensing effort.

Bendy18 June 2009 · 12:46

Ah, no, my company is only my day job, this wouldn't be remotely covered by work. But I could convert to outlines perhaps.

Si_Daniels21 June 2009 · 06:59

I'm glad to hear that. Things are probably different in the UK. Over here its common to have employment terms and conditions that state that any ideas and inventions employees come up with are owned by their employer.

http://www.bing.com/search?q=employee+ideas+inventions&src=IE-SearchBox

I could see a bad employer trying to use this wording to do a land-grab on a font, or get a better deal.

Göran Söderström22 June 2009 · 01:58

Treat this case as it was a logo-job. Sell the outlines only of the word for a bigger amount of money, as it was handdrawn for this specific purpose.

Bendy23 June 2009 · 07:32

Looks like we have decided to go with Bryant (ah well, sure I'll be able to use Mint for something soon). The agency thought that was the best for the job so I'm going with their judgment. I think also it will be more useable since there are four weights that can be used for supporting documents. Mint is not at that stage of readiness yet.

So now I'm using Bryant for titles and stuff, can anyone recommend a companion body face for it? Currently I'm using Minion which doesn't quite look right. I'll have to have a dig around but if anyone has paired it with a serif before I'd love to hear which.

Bendy23 June 2009 · 07:34

Oh, the serif face needs to have small caps, italic and bold, and be suitable for extended reading. Something a bit more unique than Minion (though I do like it) and perhaps slightly funky would be interesting too.

Bert Vanderveen23 June 2009 · 08:02

Staying with Process Type, what about
Klavika
Locator
Seravek
Stratum
?

. . .
Bert Vanderveen BNO

Bendy23 June 2009 · 08:36

I don't see any serif fonts there...

Bert Vanderveen23 June 2009 · 12:19

Sorry, I missed that requirement…

. . .
Bert Vanderveen BNO

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