I don’t know the legal ins and outs of it, but it’s a professional way to deliver a logo. You should specify minimum point size for usage probably.

Yeah, I’ve worked for a couple of companies that had these logo fonts, quite useful they were too.

[I]f I have a logo that’s based on a (commercial) font which I’ve customized in Illustrator, and I make this into a font again, is this technically a legal problem?

I assume you’d put every logo variation into a single glyph? It doesn’t sound anything like you distributing a custom version of that font — rather, you supply the image in the form of a font. I don’t see how that would differ from giving them an EPS or PDF version.

It would get slightly complicated if they asked for the customized font, to use for advertising or other graphic work.

The few fonts I made (for internal use only!!) use an OpenType feature to change “JW” into my own logo :-) as a sort of easter egg.

Thanks guys.

“I assume you’d put every logo variation into a single glyph?”
Yes exactly. Thanks for sharing your thoughts Theunis – my gut feeling was telling me the same, but hey you never know.

“It would get slightly complicated if they asked for the customized font, to use for advertising or other graphic work.”
It couldn’t get complicated really, as there is no customized font – there is only a logo customized from the font (i.e. the tweaks are in Illustrator, not inside the font). That is a bit impractical, but at least this way I’m fine as per the EULA.

Was common practice in the music industry, although I have never seen an Open Type version of a “logo” font.

pbc

The only big technical downside is that some programs, including MS Word, will not display glyphs that are more than too wide (I can’t find documentation of the actual numbers). For some logos this will mean either shrinking it down so small that fidelity is lost or chopping it up across glyphs. So be careful before you make promises about what you can stuff into a font!

James hinted at UPM being another technical consideration. You might have to optimize some handles or bump up the UPM to make sure things aren’t getting distorted.

Oh right, the grid. :-\
I guess that’s a case in point for making that thing TTF flavored!

James, any clue where/how one would find out about that size limitation?

James, any clue where/how one would find out about that size limitation?

It’s a problem that type designers have been complaining about for years and Microsoft isn’t forthcoming with information. I think that it’s also probably UPM dependent. Getting it to work was a trial and error process.

I’ve made hundreds of logo fonts over the years and never ran into the size problem you describe. I also try not to let my glyphs get unusually wide. (1000 unit em with a logo glyph of 4000 plus units has never been a problem).

I found the files from the job, the problem glyphs were between 6000 and 115000 units, and the working files were all scaled down to under 6000 units wide. So I guess 6000 was the magic number, but it’s been a few months so I’m not entirely sure.

James (both of you I guess), thanks for checking! That’s very good to know.

When I worked in business, I never wanted our corporate logo as a font because too many times I’ve seen a strange letter(s) in an arbitrary font appearing on e.g. a presentation that got sent out us working on a pc without the font in question. That result is more unprofessional than not giving the client the option to make that mistake! Not sure you can trust the average client not to do the same. Ban logo fonts, I say (you won’t have to worry about the legalities either)!

I used to do this. It is (or rather, was) definitely convenient.

Though now that I think about it, anyone know how this affects things like accessibility and machine-readability?

That said, Nick’s point seems even more of an argument against it these days.

Accessibility should not be a problem — it’s meant to be a graphic, remember?

... a presentation that got sent out us working on a pc without the font in question. ...

Nina could supply a tiny manual. OTOH ... the old adage “Making something foolproof only goes to proof there is always a bigger fool around”.

Yeah, never underestimate the inventiveness of real fools.

An arbitrary letter in a system font in the middle of a presentation is pretty bad… :-\ But given the adage above, I do wonder if it is really worse than what can go wrong in a non-fontified logo – say, a pixelated, squooshed logo in a screen presentation, if possible in 100K black?
At least the logofont version won’t be perceived as “something that’s supposed to be a logo”…
(And yes, I’ll make a tiny manual either way.)

Logo abuse is inevitable. Will a logo font help reduce logo abuse or increase it? You could embed the style manual line by line within all the unused glyphs.

The fallback is definitely an issue, I saw a bug report where a three glyph logo was falling back to Wingdings – the sad face, bomb and skull & crossbones – not a good image.

In the magazine world a logo font is definitely the format of choice. Junior designers can endlessly change the color and size of the logo on the cover as the Design Director stands behind them shouting directions. “Bigger, no, no smaller, no, no not that small. Add 20 magenta, no, no, why did you add so much magenta! Needs more blue!” etc and so on.