TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Mon Apr 15 06:55:09 EDT 2024
FONT RECOGNITION VIA FONT MOOSE
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Monotype buys Hoefler Co
In yet another takeover, Monotype buys Hoefler Co in 2021, Jonathan Hoefler's 32-year old type foundry. Active type designers on Typedrawers react to the event with disbelief and some offer afterthoughts. To preserve these reactions in case Typedrawers disappears, here is a summary. Hoefler's employees learned about this via Twitter, not from Hoefler himself. Matthew Smith: If Monotype drafted a contract which prevented Jonathan from discussing this with his team prior to the public announcement, then that is extremely shady on Monotype's part. But if Jonathon willfully accepted those terms then that is extremely disrespectful. Joyce Ketterer who works for Darden Studio puts it like this: I don't see why he did it. Not at all. He could have retired without selling the company, or sold the company to someone else who'd have kept it whole. [...] I never liked the guy or even had much respect for him professionally, but I did think he had more vision than this. [...] I regard Monotype as an incompetent lumbering giant that survives largely on inertia. Selling to them would completely invalidate everything I worked for (not to mention what Josh Darden worked for). Some things matter more than money. She continues on the topic of the treatment of employees at Hoefler Co, referring to ex-employees and/or partners Joshua Darden and Tobias Frere-Jones: My company only exists because Hoefler sued its founder (after firing him) over a font that Hoefler had no legitimate claim to. If that wasn't enough public evidence of how Hoefler treats staff, all the longer time employees were there when Hoefler claimed that the man he had concisely for years called his business partner had always been an employee, again in order to try and steal successful retail fonts. I wasn't there so I can't say if they were complicate to any of that but they certainly had fair warning they might be next. |
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Luc Devroye ⦿ School of Computer Science ⦿ McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 ⦿ lucdevroye@gmail.com ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org/fonts.html |