Custom Fonts

Creating custom fonts for clients has been the core of Tiro Typeworks’ business since 1994. During that time, we have designed many original custom typefaces, extended existing typefaces for additional scripts and languages, and programmed some of the most complex digital fonts available. We have experience making type for a variety of traditional publishing needs, as well as fonts for specific technical environments such as user interfaces and terminal emulators, and specialist fonts for mathematical and scientific typesetting.

The process of commissioning a custom typeface can be complicated, but we’re here to help you explore the options and decide if this is something that is right for you or your company. We help clients to understand and express their needs, define a project specification, and provide detailed and accurate pricing to ensure confidence in the process.

A custom font anchors a visual identity or brand, is a powerful communication tool, and a standout voice in a noisy world.

There are several reasons why a company, institution, or even an individual might want to commission a custom font or collection of fonts, whether this involves design of an original custom typeface or an extension or modification of an existing design.

The most common reason is that you need a font that does something that existing options do not provide. This could involve support for some particular set of writing systens or languages in a coordinated style, inclusion of uncommon characters for specialist texts, or optimal performance within specific technical constraints. Alternatively, the need might subsist in the design of the typeface, in how it fits with other aspects of your brand or communication strategy. Conversely, the need might not have anything to do either with the technical capabilities of the font or the characteristics of its design, but rather with licensing terms or intellectual property rights.

Some of our clients want to own the fonts that we make for them, whether because they require exclusive use in perpetuity or because they plan to distribute the fonts under license terms that they define themselves. Clients who commission fonts as part of their branding or house style typography might be particularly keen to have proprietary typefaces that only they can use. A lot of work we have done over the years has been for software companies who bundle fonts with other software, to which the fonts add value by giving the client’s users a richer typographic palette and more language support than their competitors. Some clients are interested primarily in fonts to solve their own typographical needs, but also see value in making the fonts available to others.

For an organisation that wants to install fonts across a large internal user base, provide fonts to external agencies and subsidiaries, deploy as webfonts to multiple domains, etc., the cost of commissioning custom fonts may be competitive with that of licensing existing fonts. This is particularly the case if the custom fonts are not exclusive to the client, or exclusive only for a limited time. In this case, a client can obtain the benefits of a bespoke font solution at a price similar to—or sometimes less than—that of an off-the-shelf font license.

At the end of this page, we showcase a number of custom font commissions we have undertaken over the years, and explain the reasons behind each commission and the benefits to the client.

We approach every custom font commission enquiry, small or large, in the same way. You can expect us to ask you a lot of questions to help define the scope of the project and to determine your needs. Often, a prospective client comes to us with only a fairly vague notion that they might want to commission a font, and part of our job is to clarify that notion and give a practical shape to what the commission would involve, what options the client might consider, and what these would cost. Typically, this process results in a written project proposal, price quote, and estimated schedule, usually accompanied by a detailed technical specification for the glyph set of the font(s) and a statement of deliverables. This process can take several weeks to complete, during which time we are in regular contact with the prospective client, preferably with a designated contact person: this makes the process as efficient as possible, and contributes to mutual confidence and the foundation of a working relationship even before a project is contracted. During this phase of a project, the work we do on consulting, planning, and preparing the font specification is not charged to the prospective client unless either a) some significant research is required or b) a rush service is requested. A fee for the planning work is incorporated in the overall project fee, and is only charged to the client if the project goes ahead; however, any materials provided by Tiro Typeworks to the prospective client is confidential and may not be shared with other parties or used in obtaining price quotes from our competitors. Project discussions are often preceded by the signing of a mutual non-disclosure agreement.

The more detail you can provide about your needs upfront, the quicker the process will be. Typical questions that we ask prospective clients include:

• Are there specific scripts or writing systems that the fonts should support?
• Are there specific languages or groups of languages that the fonts should support?
• What kinds of texts do you need to be able to typeset with the fonts?
• Do you know what range of styles, weights, widths, optical sizes, or other font variants you might need?
• Do you have existing typographic style guides within which the fonts need to be used? If not, do you require help establishing such style guides to make the most of your new fonts?
• Are there specific media in which the fonts need to perform well? Are the fonts to be used primarily in print or on screen? Are there non-traditional media in which the fonts need to work, e.g. AR or VR headsets? Do you have known targets in terms of hardware devices, screen resolutions, or print technologies?
• Do you need the fonts to work in particular software applications or operating systems?
• Are there specific technical constraints within which the fonts need to work that we should know about? e.g. low resolution embedded device screens, limited vertical or horizontal space, backlit signage, etc.
• Do you need to own the fonts outright, i.e. will Tiro Typeworks assign all intellectual property rights in the design and/​or font software to you? This is something to think about carefully, because the value inherent in the rights can signficantly affect the price of a project.
• Do you plan to distribute the fonts in some way or reserve them for your exclusive use? We can advise on options in this regard, including selecting or drafting an appropriate distribution or end-user license agreement.
• If the project involves additions or modifications to an existing font, do you have the requisite permissions or license to commission Tiro Typeworks to undertake this work? Do you have a license agreement that governs your use and/​or distribution of the derivatives made by adding to or modifying the existing font? We will only work on fonts from another type foundry if they have granted permission for us to do so, or if the fonts are distributed under an appropriate open source or libre license agreement.

If you can’t answer all of these questions, don’t worry: we’re here to help you determine your needs and find the answers.

Once the project proposal, technical specification, and pricing is agreed, a contract between the parties will be drawn up, reviewed, and signed. Some of our clients, particularly in the software sector, have standard contracts relating to fonts, but many of our clients ask us to provide a draft contract. The parties are responsible for their own legal fees in reviewing and revising contracts.

Sometimes, prospective clients approach us with a simple question: ​‘How much will it cost for you to make us a font?’

As the process described above should make clear, there is no way answer to such a question without first asking a lot of other questions. At Tiro Typeworks, we stand by accurate and justifiable pricing, which means we won’t quote you a price until we have all the information we need to be able to calculate what that price should be. That usually means doing a lot of work upfront to define the scope of the project as fully as possible (even taking into account that some things may change or expand during the course of the project).

The total price of a project is the combination of the cost of the development work and the value of the rights granted or assigned to the client.

Pricing of work is based on the technical specification of the project, focused on the design and creation of the glyphs and their spacing, and on programming of layout behaviour (glyph substitution and/​or positioning), with additional line items for source management, font mastering, and testing. Glyph creation costs are calculated on a per-glyph basis—hence the importance of defining a draft glyph set for the project before submitting a price quote to the client—, usually in a tiered categorisation that takes into account the relative complexity of glyph shapes. Layout programming and other line items are priced at an hourly rate based on time estimates informed by previous experience on similar projects.

Pricing of rights for custom fonts is usually calculated by applying a multiplier to the work price, on the basis that the size and complexity of a project reflects its value. We also take into account things like the size of the commissioning organisation, specific plans the client might have to leverage the value of the fonts, and whether the client is a for-profit or non-profit entity. The multiplier applied depends what kind of rights the client wishes to assume, and there are a lot of options in this regard.

• A client may opt to own the fonts outright, meaning that Tiro Typeworks formally assigns ownership of all rights to the intellectual property inherent in the fonts to the client, incuding copyright, potential design patent or industrial design registration, and trademarks. This gives the client the right to do whatever they want with the fonts, in perpetuity, including modifying, extending, distributing under commercial or libre and open source licenses, or selling on the fonts and their rights as assets.
• A client may opt to have Tiro Typeworks retain ownership rights but publish the fonts under a libre or open source license (the Open Font License or Apache 2.0 license are common choices for this purpose), or to put them in the public domain (which means both Tiro Typeworks and the client formally disclaim ownership rights).
• A client may opt for Tiro Typeworks to retain ownership but grant to the client perpetual, non-exclsuive usage rights and/​or the right to distribute the fonts under an agreed license (e.g. fonts licensed from the client for non-commercial use by third parties).
• A client may opt for Tiro Typeworks to retain ownership but grant to the client a period of exclusive use of the fonts, during which time we refrain from licensing the fonts to any other customers. Typical periods or exlusivity are three year or five years, and contracts usually provide terms for renewal of exclusivity or to buy-out remaining rights if clients later decide they want to own the fonts outright.

In some cases, we are also able to help clients budget for large projects by spreading payment over multiple years, including payment for rights transfer allocated to future years after delivery of the fonts.

Rush fees. Type design is a reflective practice that benefits from iterative review and refinement over time: it isn’t something that should be rushed. Most of the projects we have done for clients have taken many months, and some larger ones have taken years to complete. Sometimes, though, you need something in a hurry, and although we can’t promise our best work under such circumstances, we will try to accommodate your schedule if other work permits, but typically at double or triple our normal rates depending how little time is available.

Since 1994, Tiro Typeworks has made custom fonts for a wide variety of clients, often establishing working relationships that involve multiple projects over time, which speaks to our clients’ satisfaction. Early in our careers in type design, the founders John Hudson and Ross Mills developed an interest in multilingual typesetting and computing, and in supporting minority and indigenous languages in publishing and software. This is reflected in many of our custom font projects, as well as in our involvement with the Unicode Cosortium, the World Wide Web Consortium’s webfonts working group, and the Open Font Format standardisation committee.

In addition to designing typefaces in-house, we regularly work with external collaborators and advisors, experts in particular writing systems and languages, and with designers and art directors experienced in the typography of those writing systems and languages. Sometimes we are specifically asked to put together and manage a team on behalf of a client; other times we use our discretion in identifying the best people to work with us on a project.

We have made custom fonts that support various configurations of the following scripts, sometimes as individual designs and more often as multiscript fonts supporting as many as 15 different writing systems:

• Arabic
• Bengali
• Canadian Indigenous Syllabics
• Chakma
• Cherokee
• Cyrillic
• Devanagari
• Geʽez (Ethiopic)
• Greek (polytonic and monotonic)
• Gujarati
• Gurmukhi
• Hebrew (Biblical and modern)
• Javanese
• Kannada
• Latin
• Malayalam
• Meetei Mayek
• Odia
• Ol Chiki
• Sinhala
• Sora Sompeng
• Soyombo
• Tamil
• Telugu
• Thai

We have also made specialised fonts for mathematical typesetting, CAD systems, linguistics, epigraphy and palaeography, numismatics and sigillography, and other areas of scholarship.

We have made many fonts for major technology companies, including Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, as well as for a number of smaller software firms; for individual publishers and publishing associations, including Brill, Dumbarton Oaks, the Society for Biblical Literature, and the STI Pub consortium; and for educational and governmental institutions, including the University of British Columbia, and the government and language commission of the Territory of Nunavut.

Our design work is often research-driven, with reference to both manuscript and print traditions of a writing system, and our familiarity with the technical limitations of historical typesetting systems often helps us to identify trends in design that have resulted from those limitations and that we are able to overcome. Several of our regular collaborators and advisors are on staff at leading research institutions, with easy access to important collections and archives relating to global type design, printing history, and writing systems. While we have proven experience in design and production of fonts for many scripts, we are also open to new challenges.

These days, almost all the fonts we make are in the OpenType format, with which we have been involved since its development in the mid-1990s (in 2022, our founder John Hudson received a Technology & Engineering Emmy award for his contributions to the OpenType specification). We regularly make fonts in both TrueType and CFF flavours of OpenType, as well as in the webfont formats WOFF and WOFF2, and can advise clients on which format or formats are best suited to their needs. We also have some more limited experience with Apple’s AAT format, and in the past made fonts in Adobe Type 1 PostScript and other historical formats for particular devices or environments, including bitmap fonts or emulations of terminal fonts.

The following are just a few examples of the kinds of fonts we have made for clients over the years, selected to illustrate a variety of kinds of work and also a variety of choices that clients have made regarding rights.

ABP Newspaper Fonts #

Since 2010, we have produced several custom font families for the Anandabazar Patrika newspaper group in Kolkata, India. These projects, all undertaken with Dr Fiona Ross as design director, involved a number of in-house and external designers, with Tiro Typeworks responsible for client communications and contracting, glyph set and other technical specifications, and OpenType Layout implementation. The fonts are used in newspaper publishing in the Bangla (Bengali) language, and include headline types (Sarkar and ABP Extra Bold) and text types (ABP Text and ABP 2015).

Initially, the client opted for a renewable three-year period of exclusive use of the Sarkar fonts, with Tiro Typeworks retaining rights; at the end of the three-year period, the client opted to buy-out the rights in order to own the fonts. Rights to the subsequent fonts were purchased outright by the client, who remains the exclusive user of the fonts.

ABP Extra Bold was designed by Neelakash Kshetrimayum and Fiona Ross, 2015, as a commission to celebrate the 70th birthday of Anandabazar Patrika’s publisher, Aveek Sarkar. ABP was Text designed by John Hudson and Fiona Ross (based on earlier design by Holloway and Ross), 2018. The low contrast Sarkar type was designed by Tim Holloway and Fiona Ross, 2010, primarily for the tabloid newspaper Ebela. ABP 2015 was designed by Neelakash Kshetrimayum and Fiona Ross, 2015, as a fresh text face for the lifestyle sections of Anandabazar Patrika.

The Brill Types #

The Brill font family was commissioned in 2008 by the venerable Dutch academic publishing house Koninklijke Brill, founded in Leiden in 1683. The brief for the project was to anchor a house typographic style for Brill’s wide-ranging publishing in the humanities with a distinctive text typeface family, and to resolve numerous problems that Brill had encountered trying to use existing available fonts: mismatched weights and styles, lack of or poor support for specialised characters, incorrect diacritic forms and mark positioning, lack of smallcaps, superiors, and other typographic articulation variants. The Brill fonts support a very extended Latin script set, including IPA and other phonetic notation systems, polytonic and monotonic Greek, Cyrillic (pan-Slavic, Central Asian, and Old Cyrillic), and an extensive set of punctuation and symbols. The Brill types have been extended several times, and the current versions include more than 6,000 glyphs in each font.

The client assumed all rights to the fonts as part of the contract, and in addition to using them in their own publications also made the fonts available under a no-fee non-commercial use license that Tiro Typeworks helped them draft. This enables the fonts to be used by scholars in a wide range of academic disciplines. In 2020, Tiro Typeworks entered into a distribution agreement with the client that empowers us to sell commercial licenses to the Brill fonts to third parties, sharing the income with the client. This kind of arrangement enables the client to recoup development costs over a period of time.

The Brill types were designed by John Hudson, with Alice Savoie
contributing much of the work on the bold weights, and later extensions
assisted by Paul Hanslow.

Nirmala #

Since 1997, we have worked on many projects for Microsoft, including the design of original typefaces as well as extensions or improvements to existing fonts owned or licensed by the client. The Nirmala project is one of the largest and most technically challenging. The brief was to develop a coordinated design for multiple South Asian writing systems that a) would also coordinate with the style of Segoe, Microsoft’s user interface and corporate branding typeface, b) would be legible at 9pt and 8pt on screen, and c) would fit within the restrictive vertical metrics of the Windows and Office user interface environments. The original commission for six scripts, in 2010, was almost immediately extended to ten scripts, and subsequently four other South Asian writing systems have been added, bringing the total supported scripts to 14 plus a Latin subset from the Segoe fonts. In 2012, a Semilight design was added to the original Regular and Bold weight family. The original Nirmala UI fonts have since been adapted to a Nirmala Text family (shown here), productised in the TrueType Collection font format that allows the two families to share significant amounts of data while freeing the Text fonts from the vertical metrics restrictions of the UI environment.

Microsoft always prefers to own fonts outright, reflecting its long commitment to typography and its central role in user experience, and the long-term value in offering fonts bundled with its software and services that are exclusive to or closely associated with the Microsoft brand.

The Nirmala types were designed by an international team managed by John Hudson, who was also responsible for the OpenType Layout programming, and design directed by Dr Fiona Ross. In order of commission:

• Devanagari designed by John Hudson.
• Bengali designed by Jo De Baerdemaeker (Semilight by Neelakash Kshetrimayum).
• Gujarati designed by David Březina (Semilight by John Hudson).
  
• Malayalam designed by Fernando Mello (Semilight by John Hudson).
• Telugu designed by Valentin Brusteaux (Semilight by John Hudson).
• Odia designed by John Hudson.
• Gurmukhi designed by John Hudson.
• Tamil designed by Fernando Mello (Semilight by John Hudson).
• Kannada designed by Valentin Brusteaux (Semilight by John Hudson).
• Sinhala designed by John Hudson.
• Ol Chiki designed by Neelakash Kshetrimayum.
• Sora Sompeng designed by Neelakash Kshetrimayum.
• Meetei Mayek designed by Neelakash Kshetrimayum.
• Chakma designed by Paul Hanslow.

Omnes Cyrillic #

This project is an example of the kind of work we sometimes do for other type foundries, and of adding new script support to an existing typeface family. The original Omnes types were designed by Joshua Darden, and have proven extremely popular especially in packaging design. In 2015, Darden Studio hired John Hudson to design a Cyrillic extension of Omnes. The design and production work resulted in a family of Cyrillic fonts matching the Omnes Latin weight range from Hairline to Black, in roman and italic. The design was iteratively reviewed during development by our usual Cyrillic advisor, Maxim Zhukov, retired typographic coordinator at the United Nations.

Since Darden Studio owns Omnes and any derivatives thereof, this project was undertaken as work-for-hire.

Omnes Cyrillic was designed by John Hudson (companion narrow width families based on the design were later added by Viktoriya Grabowska).

STIX Two #

In 2013, we were hired by the Science & Technical Information Publishing consortium (STI Pub) to thoroughly revise and extend their STIX open source fonts and produce new OpenType versions, including a Math font compatible with the dynamic equation layout model developed by Microsoft Office. Previously, we had developed the Cambria Math font for Microsoft, working closely with the math handler developers and contributing to the OpenType MATH table specification, and were able to use that experience to advise STI Pub and help them specify the scope of the project. The STIX Two family consists of four Text fonts supporting extended Latin, Slavic Cyrillic, and modern Greek, each with nearly 2,300 glyphs, and a Math font with an extensive symbol set, multiple alphanumeric styles, and optical scaling variants, containing more than 7,300 glyphs. Like the previous STIX fonts, the design of STIX Two is based on Times New Roman, but Tiro Typeworks founder Ross Mills went back to specimens of original 10pt metal Times as a reference, ignoring the spindly digital versions, and also designed new bold weights that properly coordinate with the regular, rather than the eccentric bold weights of Times.

STI Pub owns the STIX Two fonts, but makes them freely available under the libre Open Font License, under which license they are made available through Google Fonts. In 2019, Google funded new work on the STIX Two Text fonts to develop OpenType variable font sources with an axis enabling access to intermediate weights between the existing regular and bold designs.

STIX Two Text and Math were primarily designed by Ross Mills, with later revisions and additions by John Hudson and Paul Hanslow.