Typophile

Making a companion font

Aaron Carambula

I was just looking at some old work and found my 'sticky' Cooper Black Italic liagature/swash drawing from the old Type Battle.

I thought it could be interesting to make an otf of alt characters that you could just go through cooper black stuff and swap in swashy contextual alternates. A companion font, building on something good; updating rather than recreating.

It would be only new, original glyphs. There would be no ascii characters, only OT alts, and no original Cooper Black characters.

I see potential legal problems. What about releasing it free (maybe a creative commons license)? How about naming?

What do you think?

Thanks,
Aaron.

Riccardo Sartori

Dunno about legal, but for the name I would suggest Cooperative ;-)

Aaron Carambula

Oh damn riccard0, that just might be the one! Very fine idea.

Fontgrube

At least in Europe, the design of Cooper Black is copyright free. I'm not sure about NY, but probably knockoffs like "Cupertino" (bundled with Corel Draw 3 [in words: three]) were available and legal there, too.

IANAL, but AFAIK there will be trouble only if you use the actual name (Trademark) or some of the mathematical curve descriptions of an existing C B version. You could even add the ASCII characters if you traced them yourself.

Andreas

Bendy

Ooh, what fun!
Check out Cooper Black Swash Italic apparently based on Cooper's original designs.
I'd put standard alphabetic glyphs in too.

Aaron Carambula

@Fontgrube thanks, that is a good point. I should look into rights in the states. Still a bit wary of including all of the characters, though it would be clearly more useful to do that.

@Bendy good call, I think the swashes I'd do would be more extensive, but it would be good to avoid duplicating this work.

Thanks,
Aaron.

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