Hello from The Type Founders!

We are posting our message that we shared on the Adobe forum here, too, to ensure anyone with questions or concerns can see it.

We wanted to take this opportunity to offer our thoughts here. The Type Founders (or TTF) launched in 2021 and our mission is to develop an extensive library of high-quality, distinctive, and usable typefaces. We are a small team of individuals who love all things typographic and have dedicated our careers to advancing the interests of type designers and all users of type. Underneath the TTF umbrella are 27 type foundry brands and a library of 7,000+ fonts, many of which are available on Adobe Fonts. The vast majority of type designers behind these foundries remain actively involved, drawing and publishing new fonts. As custodians of these legacies and the craft, it is our business to work with those designers to help their typefaces flourish. One aspect of that is ensuring that their work is properly licensed.

The discipline of type design is uniquely positioned at the intersection of art, history, culture, and engineering. As new technologies and content platforms take hold — such as dynamic websites, mobile apps, and streaming platforms — font software and licensing have evolved from the days of buying a case of wood type to receiving a CD with a couple hundred fonts to downloading files onto your computer or accessing them directly from the cloud. This inevitably leads to some confusion about what is and is not covered by certain licenses, especially as no common license exists in our industry — a topic we spend a great deal talking about at font conferences (yes, those are actually a thing!). With Adobe Fonts, Adobe has built an amazing service for Creative Cloud subscribers, and we are lucky to be one of their partners. The Adobe Fonts library has thousands of great typefaces for any project and the service is easy to use and seamlessly integrates into Adobe apps. The font license included is straightforward, but there are a few nuances, which likely explains the confusion and frustration on this thread and why our representatives may have reached out to you to verify licensing for one of our fonts. After this letter, we will address those points specifically.

Developing well-crafted typefaces requires years of training — including specialized design and technical skills — and often involves collaboration with other designers and engineers. We understand that receiving an email telling you that you are in the wrong or asking you to purchase a license for something you thought you already owned may be frustrating but unfortunately type designers are not fairly compensated for their work if their fonts are not properly licensed, including how fonts on Adobe Fonts are used.

As mentioned above, the TTF team cares deeply about type design and typography and are here to answer any questions you might have about Adobe Fonts, font licensing in general, or anything at all related to type. Don’t hesitate to reach out at any time: info@thetypefounders.com.

Thank you from the TTF team!
— Aaron, Bram, Dan, Ivan, Jill, Marina, Paley, Richard, Sam, and Tiffany

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To address some of the questions raised on the Adobe thread, any font on Adobe Fonts can be used for personal and commercial projects, with a few exceptions, as outlined in Adobe’s font licensing FAQ (https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html). This includes using the fonts on websites as long as you follow Adobe’s instructions (https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/add-fonts-website.html). In practical terms, for web use via Adobe Fonts, this means:

1. You need to use the Adobe Fonts web font hosting service (or CDN) to serve the fonts to your website.
2. If you want to host the font files on your website or your client’s website, you would need to purchase a license that grants that right (generally called a “self-hosted” web license) and use the web font files provided by the licensor, which would be WOFF and WOFF2 files, not OTFs and TTFs, which are desktop file formats.
3. Any client or third party needs their own Adobe Fonts license via Creative Cloud to serve fonts to their website (https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html#web-...) — or they can purchase a web license directly from the foundry or authorized reseller.

There are a couple of issues we wanted to clarify, too, related to @Bobby Henderson’s comments:

“Many businesses and organizations who hire web designers and developers to build web sites are not going to be doing the web hosting work themselves.”
This is not accurate; millions of business websites self-host their web fonts and modern website building tools have made this much easier than in the past. If anyone has questions about self-hosting web fonts, please send us an email as we are happy to help!

2. “If my graphic design clients had to buy font files they don’t need simply because I used them in a design project they would be pretty upset.”
The Adobe Fonts license — and virtually every other font license — allows you to create artwork or other assets on behalf of your client. As long as you only share the final graphics, your client would not need to purchase a font license. If your client needs to edit the graphics or otherwise use the fonts, they would need to have their own Creative Cloud subscription or purchase a license to use the font.