BBC's New Logo

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

It's very similar to coffee. Lots of wankers with no clue, being performatively aghast at 'comic sans' because they've heard other people doing the same. "Ugh, look at the thickness of the descenders on that. And those serifs are *so* ugly," and you know they couldn't tell the difference between Helvetica and Berlin Sans.

I'm aghast, because I've designed several logos in the last couple of weeks, but I get paid peanuts.

[Icehaven]

I've recently discovered that the font we use for our band logo, that we use to advertise gigs and on the banner we hang above the stage when we play that my other half painstakingly spent several days cutting out stencils and spray painting to create, is apparently the band logo equivalent of Comic Sans and you might as well call yourselves The 6th Form Amateurs if you use it. I don't care, I still like it but I can't look at it right now. 

[paruses]

So who owns fonts and who do you have to pay and under what circumstances? Are they regulated with a sort of PRS organisation?

[Blumf]

I've recently discovered that the font we use for our band logo, that we use to advertise gigs and on the banner we hang above the stage when we play that my other half painstakingly spent several days cutting out stencils and spray painting to create, is apparently the band logo equivalent of Comic Sans and you might as well call yourselves The 6th Form Amateurs if you use it. I don't care, I still like it but I can't look at it right now.

Metal umlauts?

[olliebean]

Apparently in the last election the Tories did some social media ads deliberately in Comic Sans just so loads of people would share and repost them in order to say, "Look at how shit this is, Comic Sans lol!" and the algorithms would go "loads of people are sharing and reposting this, it must be really engaging content" and show it to more people and they'd get a load of free advertising.

[mjwilson]

It's very similar to coffee. Lots of wankers with no clue, being performatively aghast at 'comic sans' because they've heard other people doing the same. "Ugh, look at the thickness of the descenders on that. And those serifs are *so* ugly," and you know they couldn't tell the difference between Helvetica and Berlin Sans.

That doesn't make sense, coffee doesn't even have descenders.

[Blumf]

What's the coffee equivalent of Comic Sans? Gold Blend?

[buttgammon]

What's the coffee equivalent of Comic Sans? Gold Blend?

Maxwell House.

[steveh]

So who owns fonts and who do you have to pay and under what circumstances? Are they regulated with a sort of PRS organisation?

As a very simplified explanation... There's a small number of companies typically from the old typesetting days who own a lot of the common ones and then intermediaries who resell them or licence them on a subscription basis. Normally you wouldn't pay anything extra for the use of a font in a rendered form - the BBC logo for example. However, if you say wanted your website to use that same font for all the text you'd likely pay an ongoing fee for that. The glyphs / graphic forms of a lot of classic fonts are out of copyright, but the versions embodied in computer fonts are not and the names are often trademarked so nobody else could sell a font under the same name.