I love how all these 'brand' fonts look indistinguishable to an untrained eye and still brain-frying-bordedom-inducingly close to each other to someone like me who actually studied & worked in typography.
It's just the design team running in place. And at a certain scale, it's cheaper to pay a type foundry $100k once, rather than paying Monotype continuous fees for a legacy family.
But as someone who has made multiple neutral sans families, I agree. The launch rhetoric about creating a differentiated visual identity is comical when you look at all the interchangeable corporate sans together.
Pretty sure it's just the pendulum swinging. Today its all about serious and clean and minimal. Then it will be whimsical and maximalist again. Skinny jeans, baggy jeans. Skeumorphic, flat.
The purpose of the brand font is to avoid paying licensing fees. Because the typefaces aren’t protected by copyright it’s usually enough to just have someone go and essentially clone an existing font. The whole thing is an artifact of peculiarities of IP law
> The purpose of the brand font is to avoid paying licensing fees.
There are more than enough good fonts under OFL that it surprises me people want to commission a custom font primarily for licensing reasons rather than using a standard one.
I think modern fonts include hinting software and stuff like that.
If you produced a bunch of screenshots of the output at various sizes, and then asked an LLM to convert to ttf or whatever, I’m guessing that’d be OK. I’m not an expert in this stuff though.
Brand fonts are typically a specific license by the original creator of the font, often together with some adjustments (e.g. big companies often need additions for global markets that were not in the smaller original font)
Corporate branding is nothing but an exercise in playing psychological tricks on people. None of it is actually distinct or important. But the silver tongued guys say it is, so people believe it even though it isn't true.
But as someone who has made multiple neutral sans families, I agree. The launch rhetoric about creating a differentiated visual identity is comical when you look at all the interchangeable corporate sans together.