You could create a license which allowed your employer to use your fonts for their client work, but not for projects where you weren’t the designer. Is it realistic to expect that you are the only designer to work on a given client? What if you are sick or on vacation, or have moved on?

But you might have difficulties if you created an identity or campaign, and your employer’s client needed to do some work using it, in house, and would be unable to licence the fonts commercially to do that.

As Nick said, you could create a license. But I doubt if any agency would agree to such a license, for the reasons that he mentioned.

Even if you're the only designer assigned to a project, it's still the agency's client and the agency's project, and they will want to have access to the assets used in case work needs to be done in your absence. For example, suppose a year after you leave the client asks them to update the job?

Probably best just to use those fonts on your freelance projects.

The only thing trying to get any employer to sign anything
that limits them does is make you more likely to be fired. :-/

hhp

If your fonts aren't good enough to sell commercially, as you say, then you shouldn't be using them for professional work. If they are, and you created them on your own time, then your employer should license them on the same terms that anyone else would.

If licensing fonts is your call as a designer, they don't even have to know the foundry is you. But if they don't have a budget for licensing fonts, then you should take to heart the reality that your job is not meant to entail a level of design that transcends choosing from the available system/bundled fonts. Your decision of whether to give your work away to impress people should probably start with the assumption that you can't take it back later.

If you are creating the fonts on company time and on company computers, with company software they may own the work by default. (Your employment agreement might say so explicitly or implicitly.)

I'm not assuming you are... just adding another consideration.

If you're paranoid about people misappropriating your work, don’t even consider a career—fill- or part-time—in type design. If your work’s any good, people will steal it if they can; even if your work’s mediocre, people will steal it if they can. Unless you wish to produce your work as real-live foundry type—i.e., a real, physical product cast in metal, which cannot be emailed or downloaded—people will steal it if they can.

That's the curse—and the blessing—of digital existence.

I'm pretty sure that Joe is correct—unless things are radically different here in the UK, anything you produce as an employee is the property or your employer; that's what they are paying you for.

I think you are correct in your assumption that any prospective employer would laugh you out of the interview at your suggestion or if they wanted to spare your feelings maybe they might say "Well keep your fonts away from our computers then".

If you are freelance however things are open to negotiation I guess; I imagine it depends how much they want your work.

Best thing is to never mention your ex~temp activities. No harm in that and no hassle too.

Most employers in the creative industries consider all and any of the products made by employees to be their IP. Bad thing, I think, but it is the way it is.

> Best thing is to never mention your ex~temp activities

Most design firms I've worked for full-time had in the contract that I was forbidden to do any freelance design work while I was employed there (unless I had prior permission).

I remember a fellow designer who would come to work exhausted because he had stayed up all night trying to meet his freelance deadlines. Didn't take long for management to figure out what was going on, and he got a stern warning to knock off the freelance work if he wanted to keep his day job.