Expert insights, trends, and best practices in typography, font design, and AI-powered solutions.
Most websites are running fonts they probably should not be. Some were paid for. Some are old free Google Fonts that have since changed terms. Some are paid fonts somebody dropped in five years ago and forgot. The URL Scan API takes a URL, detects every font on the page, and returns a license compliance report. One HTTP call.
Spotify spent five years renting one of the most popular geometric sans-serifs on the market. Then, in 2018, they quietly built their own. The story of Spotify Sans is about what happens when a brand grows so large that licensing somebody else's typography becomes a permanent line item, and ownership becomes the only sane long-term move.
In 2024, a PE firm extracted $600 million from Monotype, the company behind Helvetica and Arial. Their licensing-complexity moat made it possible. Here's why AI is about to make that whole business model obsolete and what comes next.
Most AI-generated fonts land 90% right and 10% wrong. The old fix was to regenerate the whole thing and pray. Font Studio now lets you fix any single letter in about fifteen seconds, optionally with your own reference image, while every other glyph stays exactly as it was.
OpenAI builds artificial intelligence that can write code, pass bar exams, and generate images from text. Their website is set in a font hand-drawn by a single type designer in Wellington, New Zealand, based on a 1920s German specimen he found in an archive. The tension between those two facts is the whole story.
Apple has been obsessed with typography since before the first Mac shipped. The font on your iPhone right now is the result of four decades of decisions, a calligraphy class Steve Jobs almost skipped, a smartwatch that was too small for Helvetica, and a designer named Antonio Cavedoni who spent years solving a problem most people never knew existed.
Netflix didn't just pick a font. They fired one, paid a fortune for years, then quietly built their own. The story of Netflix Sans is about money, brand control, and why the typeface on your screen right now was engineered to feel like cinema.
Declassified documents reveal how The Times of London's 1932 typeface commission became a weapon of information warfare, shaping global communication and international relations for nearly a century.
Netflix's $50 million legal battle over custom fonts sparked an industry-wide war that's reshaping how companies approach typography, brand strategy, and intellectual property.
While letter shapes can't be copyrighted, font software enjoys robust IP protection, creating a $4.1 billion licensing maze that catches businesses in million-dollar legal traps.
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