Typefaces and Student Work
My syllabus, in every type and design class I teach, is clear: I will not accept work that uses pirated or stolen fonts. I don’t think that looking the other way on this issue for ‘the sake of learning’ or any other excuse I have heard is doing students any favors. And it’s clear that if a student thinks it’s okay while in college, their behavior will likely continue in the working world—as evidenced by the number of professional graphic designers who download type from illegal torrent sites, as well as studios that share a single font file that exceeds the license allowance.
Students aren’t learning how to be better typographers this way anyway. If they can’t design something that is engaging and effective using the tools they have, then they’re not working hard enough. I’ve always liked that Jessica Hische has talked about this in several of her talks: she didn’t like the free fonts that were available to her in art school, so she took the initiative to draw the kinds of letters she wanted to see in her work.
Type is expensive, and often prohibitively so for students. Adobe has tried to meet them half way with a student package, but in a culture that embraces the notion that ‘if you can get it for free, why pay even a little?’ I wonder how effective that approach has even been.
But type costs a lot for a reason. The sheer man hours that go into a typeface is so significant that for a typeface to be commercially successful, a lot of licenses need to be sold. It’s especially hard because usually those man hours are genuinely worked by a single person. To further muddy the profit margin, third-party type distributors and foundries take a large cut of each sale. No one ever got filthy rich off this stuff.
Lastly, tempting as it may be to draw the parallel, this isn’t the same as software* and it isn’t the same as music. It’s not even the same as illustration or photography, which—and I’m not advocating stealing any of these things, either—can still make up for some losses with a large usage license, and anyway isn’t nearly as easy to obtain in high resolution.
People on the right side of this fence can complain all they want, but ultimately there isn’t a lot most of them can do about it. Teachers, however, have an opportunity and a responsibility to instill the ethics while students are in front of them, and while we have the collateral and repercussions we can use to enforce them.
*Type is protected and distributed like software. But I’m establishing a difference between, for example, Adobe Creative Suite, and font licensing, because fonts behave differently (permanently) on your computer.
