Not knowing the rules of font licensing can cost you a lot of money.
Sometimes it feels like it takes having a masters in legalese just to know which fonts you can use, where, and for what.
How many times have you had to find a font, whether to make your own site or one for a client, and spent hours searching for the perfect one? You search & experiment, trying different styles, snapping screenshots from various sites & font foundries & marketplaces, plopping them into Photoshop to mock up what it might look like.
You finally get something fantastic, but before you send it to your client (or ship it yourself), there's something important you've got to check – the darn license.
- “Can I even use this font for commercial work?”
- “How much does this cost?”
- “Can I use it online, or only in print?”
- “What about apps, and ebooks?”
People ask about this kind of stuff all the time, in emails, tweets, conversations, you name it. And that's a huge part of what compelled us to start The League in the first place – it can be painful having to learn this stuff by trial and error.
So we made something you could read quickly, and keep as a reference. A tasty little twenty-minute read on the basics of what you need to know about different font licenses and how to use them.
It's friendly, digestible, and easy-to-understand, (unlike reading through all those painful EULA's), while still breaking down all the core topics you ought to be up-to-speed on as someone using fonts in the real world.
And considering how costly even an innocent wrong move could be in the world of expensive licenses — this is an instance where a few bucks could save you literally millions down the road.
It's a short & very readable book, with chapters & sections designed directly around the questions you need answers to. Inside, we'll go over things like:
- The basic types of font license categories you need to understand when using & buying fonts
- When you can share fonts & when you legally can't
- The basics of web fonts, when they're okay to use, and where to find them
- The new frontier of apps & ebooks, and more — and why they're priced so differently than other types of licenses
- The benefits of open-source fonts & what you can do with 'em