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Adrian Hanft III of Colorado has made a great point about fonts:
You don’t need to own a font to read a book set in Goudy. You don’t need to own Futura to watch a Wes Anderson film. You don’t need to own Times to read the Times. You don’t need to own any fonts to watch television. Why not? Because that would be insane. And yet this same logic doesn’t apply on the internet. Online, a person needs to own a fully licensed version of a font in order to view it in a web browser.
He goes on to outline five steps to font freedom. Not without controversy, perhaps his best thought is to see the classic type forms of history remastered by an open source digital typography project.
Alas, that still leaves us with the challenge of how to get those classic faces distributed to the world in an effective fashion. And then (dare I ask it) — would we like the appearance of the Web if the font floodgates were opened up? Is it perhaps the restraining effect of the limited number of universally-distributed typefaces that ensures some relative degree of readability and usability on the Web?
Baffled by U.S. copyright laws? Join the club. We all know it exists, and we all would prefer to avoid falling on the wrong side of the law. For an initial primer in the basics of copyright, you should pay a visit to the U.S. Copyright Office. And for future reference, you might find this flowchart for determining copyright duration to be of help -- published by Bromberg & Sunstein LLP, a law firm which specializes in intellectual property.
The Library of Congress has made available a digitized collection of nearly six thousand photocrom prints, all of which are in the public domain, through its Prints and Photographs Online Catalog. Photocrom prints are visually striking for their almost impossible blend of real-world photography and artistic coloring. A handy resource -- whether for cool desktop wallpaper or your next graphic design project.
Curious to find the source and origin of these unusual prints, I did a bit of research. The term "photocrom" comes from Switzerland where this unique process of creating color prints out of black and white photographs was originally developed. The photocrom process was licensed for use in the United States, beginning in the summer of 1897, by the Detroit Photographic Company.
A photocrom is a color photo lithograph which is produced from a number of black and white negatives. The number of colors used in a photocrom print varied from four to fourteen. Each color was given its own negative, and the final prints were created through the application of the different color impressions from multiple lithographic stones. According to one source:
The stones used by the Detroit Photographic Company were imported from Bavaria and coated with a special Syrian "asphaltum" substance that would be chemically sensitized to light, put in contact with a photographic negative, exposed to the sun for up to several hours, then "developed" in oils of turpentine.
The areas of the very thin asphalt gel most exposed to light would harden, becoming insoluble; the less exposed residue would be washed away. Tonal values of the remaining positive image could be manipulated by varying the chemistry and development times. Technicians could do the equivalent of burning and dodging by retouching the brush and polishing with fine pumice powder. The final steps in preparing the stone were an acid etch to bond the remaining image with its very fine grain, and a glycerin bath.
Makes me thankful for modern, four-color process printing technology.
