Every time the font resource was downloaded from their server, the foundry counted that as a licensed pageview. ‣ There was no explicit reporting involved. ‣ You were not allowed to self-host the font files, and had to load them directly from the hosting URL provided by the font foundry In the case of the font foundry my client was licensing from,
Ended up using a Worker function to tidy up after the janky WAF header mangling, got them to remove the explicit challenge page, and just swapped out the licensed font for a generic/free one for suspicious activity.Īll because of that stupid pageview based font licensing model and its susceptibility to abuse. It was such a pain to service the client that I ended up convincing their network security team to let me pilot Cloudflare in front of the WAF (that they insisted remain). It made for an abrasive visitor experience, fundamentally broke server logging data (due to header mangling), and constantly broke third party integrations. They slapped the site behind an aggressively configured enterprise WAF in response to that bill specifically. I had one client that started getting their product catalog scraped aggressively, and the invoice for their licensed font usage that month was an order of magnitude higher than they expected (low six figures, vs.
Plex is now installed in every IBMer’s computer and will eventually be used be in all its products, ending Helvetica’s reign there once and for all.It's also incredibly risky for advertising and marketing campaigns. Creating a custom typeface solves that inequity. Fonts are digital assets that companies license on a per-user basis and the digital typeface company Monotype owns the rights to Neue Helvetica.īecause of the cost factor, not all 380,000 IBM employees had access to Neue Helvetica on their machine, explains Yoo. Until recently, it was spending over a million dollars each year to license Neue Helvetica for the company.
“It’s basically a component of IBM.” Free fonts for allįor all its intangible impulses for ditching Helvetica, IBM also had a very pragmatic reason. “Plex is being a part of something before it, like ‘duplex,'” explains Abbink. When Noyes’s family declined to lend their name to the font, Abbink came up with “plex,” a four-letter construct that could be linked with other letters to form a word-like a metaphorical bolt. IBM initially wanted to call it “Eliot” as a tribute to the founding architect of its design program, Eliot Noyes.
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