Font licensing, explained without the legalese

Font licensing trips up more designers than any other part of typography, mostly because “I downloaded it” and “I am licensed to use it” feel like the same thing and are not.

You license fonts, you do not buy them

Almost every commercial font is sold as a licence to use the software under stated conditions, not as a transfer of ownership. Those conditions usually vary by how you use it: desktop, web, app embedding, and broadcast are typically priced separately.

The common expensive mistake is buying a desktop licence, designing a website with it, and only later discovering that serving the font to visitors needed a separate web licence — often priced by monthly page views.

What the OFL allows

Most free fonts worth using are released under the SIL Open Font License. It permits, without payment or registration:

• Commercial use, including client work
• Embedding in websites, apps, PDFs and products
• Modifying the font and redistributing your modified version

It has essentially one restriction: you cannot sell the font by itself, and any modified version must keep the same licence and must not use the original’s reserved name.

For practical purposes, an OFL font can be used for anything you are likely to be doing.

The Apache case

Some Google Fonts use the Apache License 2.0 instead. It is, if anything, more permissive — it does not carry the reserved-name restriction. Either way, commercial use is fine.

A short checklist

1. Check the licence file that ships with the font, not a blog post about it.
2. Match the licence type to the actual use: web serving is not desktop use.
3. For client work, confirm who holds the licence — you or the client.
4. Keep a record of what you licensed and when.
5. When in doubt, an OFL font removes the question entirely.