*INHALES DEEPLY* ok, we are finally ready to talk about this. The following is directed at our respected peers and not our clients
THREAD:
THREAD:
After a number of you objected quite loudly, and TEFF threatened to sue us, we decided it wasn't worth the fight, and pulled Eros Text from our catalogue. Unfortunately, TEFF seems to be using Dutch copyright law to do more patent trolling than type designing these days
That being said, imagining Bram and Matthias painstakingly going from felt tip pen to the Icarus system and engineering the entire family with 1980’s software over almost a decade, it's understandable why TEFF would be protective
We have made our peace with the whole episode as a kind of buddhist exercise, destroying our own creation. Besides, as we like to say when our software crashes and we lose work: it's always better the second time :)
It makes sense that, in an industry where our bread-and-butter is iterating on the same set of historical models ad-infinitum, an honest and civil discussion on the subject of originality is hard to come by
Radical changes in format over a relatively short period of time (metal>photo>digital) created a practical need for “revivals” to carry popular designs from one format to the next, offering designers countless uncontroversial opportunities to iterate on their predecessors works
This has led to an understanding in the digital era that working with source material is good and right as long as your material came from a book. The best among us always talk honestly about their source material, and are never opaque about it when presenting their work
As the digital era of type design reaches maturity, and understanding that this will probably be the final form that typefaces take for the remainder of human history, we have to recon with the issue of using digital-native designs as source material...
...in a way that this is both fair to the original designers, and fair to future generations who want to carry these aesthetics forward into contemporary spaces.
If we don’t get this right, the golden age of type design may soon come to an end
If we don’t get this right, the golden age of type design may soon come to an end
We felt that 22 years was a legitimate and respectful interval from the original digital release of Lexicon to engage with the material in a productive and novel way, paying homage to De Does at every step.
Some agreed, others disagreed
Some agreed, others disagreed
We need to decide as an industry where the line of the “too soon” taboo is. The answer cannot be that working with digital-native source material is forbidden, and on the flip side we should not abide those who seek easy profits from others’ ingenuity
A worrying trend we are noticing is that as designers feel more and more pressure to gain traction online, the practice of teasing out work-in-progress designs has become commonplace, and plagiarism is now happening in real time
The point is that this is a complicated and nuanced issue, and acting like a bully online and saying mean things to people is not going to address it
Twitter doesn't have to be a collection of atomized egos desperately attempting to claw their way to the top of the shitpile. It can be a place where we engage earnestly and productively on subjects that matter
