San Francisco: beautiful weather, beautiful type, beautiful women mostly from Salt Lake City and Vancouver, and lots and lots of Germans. Thursday night, Linotype (as embodied by the generous Bruno) bought many many drinks and awarded a pretty hefty volume of loot in the form of big fat checks (and in some cases just flowers) to a number of tremendously talented designers. Notable winners include our good friend Eduardo Omine for his Beret, crazy Tony and Caio Silva for their beautiful and ingenious Samba and Eduardo Manso for his Bohemia family.
After the certainly complete awards presentation, Herr Spiekermann of the sharp bow-tie regaled us with tales of his misspent youth in “Sex & Drugs & Rock and Roll.” The evening was finished off by the Typophile Film Festival, a high point in Typecon thus far that would have been even better had the Linotype open bar been moved into the screening room. Cheshire Dave stole the show as usual with his new short film Etched in Stone, as did the fantastic silent Helvetica film.
More details are available over at Foreword, where Cheshire continues to give a complete run-down of the daily events here at Typecon 2004.
Seriously, I had this preconception that TypeCon would be heavily American, but overall there were people from everywhere*, and on Friday it was totally German – I thought I was back in Leipzig or something. BTW, Eduardo’s Beret is really really nice – it even looked good on that crappy projector.
* Hey, we even had like 5 black people. That’s like 1% of attendees. Which is 1% more than any other type conference I’ve been to. So a good start in giving some color to type. Let’s shoot for 10% in NYC.
hhp
Yeah, those Germans have a way of sneaking in everywhere, but at least they brough some totally wicked new typefaces with them. Beret is nice, but I really like Samba, Pirouette, and Lubok.
So how about those winning entries from Linotype’s contest. Do the prizes make entry worthwhile? (Is anybody else sad that they didn’t enter?)
Stewf and I were discussing this during that … extended evening. How much do you have to give up in terms of royalties to accept the award? A single year? All rights forever? Something in between? I’m not sure. Seeing as the majority of sales would be in the year the award was given, even a year might not be all that great for the designer, although I suppose the PR couldn’t be beat.
> How much do you have to give up in terms
> of royalties to accept the award? A single
> year? All rights forever? Something in
> between?
Hmm, as far as I know, there’s no such thing as ‘giving up’ royalties because of the award. The royalties’ percentage paid by Linotype can be found in their License Agreement model, which, IIRC, is available from their website.
Josh, the “catch” is that you have to give the font to Linotype (if they want it). I think whether you win anything or not. This is much stricter than the original contest in the late 90s (which I entered). But with a top prize of 4500 euro, it’s no stinker at all…
I think the contest makes a lot of sense to designers at a certain point in their “career”, as well as designers who have an existing happy relationship with Linotype. Considering Bruno Steinert’s exceptionally intelligent and gracious attitude about all things typographic, this number will be growing.
BTW, you know who impressed me the most at TC? Akira Kobayashi. He has a very sharp eye, a keen mind, lives for high craftsmanship and brings a serene balance to type design. Zapf is lucky to be working with him.
hhp
That’s right. “Hermann-the-German” is lucky to have Akira Kobayashi on his team. Akira has super powers, as far as I am concerned.
I believe that Linotype pays royalties on the order of 20 percent. These royalties are paid as long as a contract lasts. Linotype distributes all winning typefaces from its contest. All non-winning entries go before the selection committe, which I think treats them like all other submissions it receives. So, if you submit your font to the contest, and it does not win a prize or an honorable mention, it then goes to the normal selection committe, where it competes against all other non-winning entries plus all non-contest entries received for potential release.
In my opinion, Linotype markets its contest-winning fonts well, making the 20% royalties nothing to sneeze atďż˝ its marketing and package deals probably mean that it would sell more copies of the font than many competitors, who offer closer to 50% royalties to their designers.
Question: If a non-winning typeface gets selected, can the designer decline the offer? If so, are there restrictions on how the designer can then sell the font?
BTW, I think that 20% depends on the state of the font when it’s handed over: if it needs more work (by Linotype staff) it might be as low as 10% from what I understand.
hhp
A winner may not decline Linotype’s contract, as far as I can tell. Buy entering the ITDC, the submission form had some sort of dotted line which had to have been signed. This gives Linotype sole distribution rights, unless it declines them. Entrants who did not win or were not later selected were notified that they could submit their designs to other foundries.
Again (and Hrant, in the name of full disclosure I should state that I will be an employee of the Linotype Library for three more days), as far as I know, Linotype does distribute fonts in cases like this one unless they are already market ready in terms of construction. I could be wrong here, but I think that all of the contest winning fonts were finished (or almost all of them) by their designers. Eduardo would know for sure, I bet.
Hrant:
> Josh, the �catch� is that you have to give
> the font to Linotype (if they want it). I
> think whether you win anything or not.
> This is much stricter than the original
> contest in the late 90s (which I entered).
> But with a top prize of 4500 euro, it�s no
> stinker at allďż˝
That’s partially correct. Linotype (actually Heidelberg) owns the trademarks for all the winner typefaces, but non-winners and non-selected works are free to be distributed elsewhere.
> Question: If a non-winning typeface gets
> selected, can the designer decline the
> offer? If so, are there restrictions on
> how the designer can then sell the font?
What Dan said. The submission to the ITDC implies that the designer agrees with Linotype’s contract (you can find it here BTW).
Dan:
> I could be wrong here, but I think that
> all of the contest winning fonts were
> finished (or almost all of them) by
> their designers. Eduardo would know for
> sure, I bet.
It seems to me that Linotype worked on all winning typefaces. I didn’t have the time to look at it carefully yet, but I noticed that they scaled down all my fonts and removed some kerning pairs. They also converted it to OpenType, adding some basic features.
This is contradictory.
I could always read the contract, but I don’t feel like it, so let me try again:
Fact: A winning font is automatically licensed by Linotype, and the submitter cannot decline. Fact: A non-winning font may or may not be licenced by Linotype, at their discretion. Remaining Question: Can a non-winning font that gets selected for licensing by Linotype be declined for licensing by the submitter? If yes, and that happens, are there any restrictions on the submitter?
hhp
Don’t know, sorry. If you enter the contest, don’t win, but they want to sell the typeface anyway, I think that the submitter may not decline. Submitting a typeface to the ITDC grants Linotype the right to distribute it, even if you don’t win a prize. Once they have told you that aren’t interested, you are then free to sell it through other channels.
If you to submit a typeface outside of the parameters of a contest, and the selection committee chose it, I imagine that you could decline it then. But this does not have anything to do with your questionďż˝
I would change this.
To encourage more -and better- submissions, and to make it more fair to submitters, I would:
1) Allow the designer of a non-winning but “selected” font to decline licensing.
2) Try to close the gap between winners and selecteds; probably simply by choosing more winners (like five per category instead of three), although you might reduce the monetary award per winner to control cost. And maybe the judges need to be briefed that the point is to choose fonts that are good candidates for Linotype licensing – is this [too] manipulative?
If a font is good enough to be licensed, it should be good enough to reward financially outright. And treating submitters more fairly would increase the submission quality as well, since more accomplished designers would participate.
hhp
Well, Hrant, this all sounds reasonable enough to me. There are no solid plans yet for when the next type contest will be. “Annual” is a misnomer that pops up online a lot; they usually happen every two years. Should I have anything to do with them in two years, I’ll remind them of your comments. But, I would rather not be with then when the next contest rolls aroundďż˝ the prizes sound so sweet that I want to be able to enter it myself!
The bit in Spiekermann’s speech about Futura is now illustrated on his blog.
Hrant, in regards to our discussion: If a designer did not win a contest, but had one of his entries selection for inclusion in the library, he would be permitted to decline the offer, and submit his work for consideration elsewhere.
Linotype is quite flexible; I’m sure that they would be open to alternative licensing agreements, if one of their designers so inquired.
I have a separate question for you, Hrant, since we are talking about Linotype. 1997 was so before my time. How did your Linotype Maral enter the Linotype Library? Did you submit it to one of their contests, or did you send it directly to the selection committee?
> he would be permitted to decline the offer
Hmmm. Are you still a Linotype employee? :-) Is this de jure or de facto? Because I thought the letter of the submission contract says the opposite. Could we get an official clarification?
Maral: First of all, I should state that I’m no longer happy with it. I am proud of the ridiculous amount of time I spent on it, but it’s really way too Latinized, and not nearly original enough – it’s based partly on ITC Cheltenham for krissake. I would never make something like that again. Unless it was a juicy custom commission. :->
The way it ended up in there was:
1) I submitted to the first Lino contest, didn’t win, but got selected. I was very happy.
2) Bernard Hofmacher’s faith, in opposition to the tech boys’ trepidation at dealing with a “foreign” script.
hhp
Hrant, I am not currently a Linotype employee, but may be one again at a future date. I’m going to remain vague about this, because the decision lies mostly with the German labor office. I’m a foreigner, and the government may not be as nice to me as my former Linotype coworkers have been… :(
My clarification came about after some of those former coworkers read my above posts. So, you could say that it is *official.*
I’m glad you mentioned B. Hofmacher in your last post. He is a super nice guy, and like Linotype’s other employees, very flexible and helpful when designers have questions (as you surely know). They don’t turn up in online forums, so many here unfortunately do not know them — unless they’ve had the opportunity of direct contact at a conference or through a competition/font submission…
> you could say that it is *official.*
No, dude, it’s still just hearsay from a former employee.
Get them to post a formal clarification, man! :-)
hhp