The Lisa Jenkins story

This story takes place in February 1999. It involves two font designers, Lisa Jenkins and Boris Mahovac, and members of an organization called Typeright.

A few years ago, Boris Mahovac, a great Croatian graphic designer and typographer, created the font Kalendar. The font had a copyright to Abeceda dizajn, Boris' outfit at the time.

Based on this wonderful font, Lisa D. Jenkins of Agent J created a lookalike font, in what appears to be an enterprise that started from scratch. She placed a demo version of this font, KitchenTiles (shown at the top of this page), on her web page and wrote there: This font was originally designed by Boris Mahovac of Abeceda dizajn. I liked the look of it, and thought it should be a fairly easy font to re-create in order to test out the Softy software. I changed a great number of the characters from his original design mostly for readability reasons. This font includes pretty much all the international characters so that everyone can enjoy it. The demo was only a sample of the full font, which was sold by Agent J. In the font itself, we find the following notice: (Copyright 1997-1998 Lisa D. Jenkins; based on "Kalendar" by Boris Mahovac/Abeceda dizajn.)

Thus far, all is fine, as characters themselves cannot be copyrighted in the United States. And Lisa was pretty honest about the process, and even showed tremendous admiration for Boris Mahovac. Is not every foundry recreating its own version of Garamond or Bodoni?

I placed a link to her site on my site, and thought that it was one of the nicest sites, with fine fonts, and proper credit given when credit was due.

February 8, 1999: Boris Mahovac sends me the following email:

So, Mahovac says he complained to Typeright, and apparently, some members of Typeright pressured Lisa Jenkins into removing the offending font. % Maybe they contacted her internet provider, who knows? I find this a very very sad story indeed.

February 13, 1999: Clive Bruton sends me the following email, which partially contradicts Mahovac's story.

So, Clive and I both contacted Lisa, and she confirmed that she was indeed pressured into removing KitchenTiles in February 1998 by one of the members of TypeRight, Chris MacGregor. (These were not her words: in fact, she said that MacGregor contacted her, not TypeRight as I had originally reported, and that everything else on my page was essentially correct, and that page was the one on which I used the term "pressure".) Clive Bruton's reaction in yet another email:

Chris MacGregor wrote to confirm Clive's timeline. He said he did not put any pressure on Lisa, but he did refer to her font removal as follows: "I am very happy that Lisa righted the wrong". Well, I do not think Lisa was "wrong". Would Lisa have removed the font if Chris had not contacted her? I don't think so. Thus, that contact triggered the removal. Would Chris MacGregor have been contacted by Mahovac had he not been a member of TypeRight? Probably not. So, any actions of his on this issue after that initial contact were a consequence of that membership. The sad victim of this whole affair is Lisa, who was talked into removing a perfectly legal font made by herself from her site, after having been contacted by Chris MacGregor, who may or may not have acted as a member of TypeRight.

Luc Devroye