On Dead History

Some thoughts
August 24, 2001

On Dead History

.....

¶ This story is about the foundry that is at the forefront of the copyright protection battle, a company that fights pirates with a passion. Emigre has sued font pirates, has taken people to court, and has sent threatening letters to webmasters. Today we look at one of their fonts, Dead History, a font published by Emigre in 1994. Here is what Emigre writes about the origins of the font: Started by P. Scott Makela while studying in the graduate design program at Cranbrook, the font was originally based on Linotypes's Centennial and Adobe's V.A.G. Rounded. It went through numerous stages of assembly and disassembly before it was licensed to Emigre Fonts in early 1994. There it was finally redrawn from scratch and completed by Zuzana Licko. Reread this carefully: it was finally redrawn from scratch. We ask you to judge for yourself, after reading the remainder of this page.

The claim

¶ We begin with a comparison with VAG Rounded, an Adobe font published in 1989, after an original design dating back to 1979 for Volkswagen. Its designers were David Bristow, Gerry Barney, Ian Hay, Kit Cooper, and Terence Griffin. The public consensus seemed to be that Dead History was a straight Fontographer blend between Linotype Centennial and VAG Rundschrift (VAG Round), but as we saw above, the Emigre site claims that all of Dead History was redrawn from scratch by Licko in 1994.

The comparison

¶ Let us compare the assumedly redrawn version of Dead History Bold (on the left) with Adobe's VAG Rounded Black (on the right). When comparing the Bezier control points, look carefully at the relative positions of the points. Yes, a few yellow points moved oh so slightly, but look at the green points on the outlines, and take any two green points that are far away from each other but almost on the same longitude or latitude. Interesting, isn't it? What would the chances be of someone redrawing a character from scratch ending up with identical relative positioning of the green points? One in a million? One in a billion? I claim (but cannot prove) that one S was obtained from the other S in a font editor by moving a few yellow control points. Not exactly what I would call "redrawn". Other characters you may wish to try include "s", "o", "a" and "O".