A few hours south, a second young man from Manhattan was making a name in the world of letters. Jonathan Hoefler was also a kid caught between two passions: in his case, computers and graphic design. Hoefler didn’t go straight to college after high school, instead finding freelance work designing lettering and logos. He also began teaching himself computer programming, enabling him to automate portions of the process.
It was a fortuitous time for a type designer to come of age. By the late 1980s the personal computer had begun to loosen the hold that big European font houses such as Linotype and Monotype had on the market. It was increasingly possible to sell directly to publications and designers, skipping layers of middlemen that typified the existing system. “I cut all that out and went straight to the end users, and that is because I knew all of them,” says Hoefler, who had set up an office in a 320-square-foot cubbyhole in downtown Manhattan. “I knew all the art directors in the city because I was the weird young kid with the Macintosh who knew the names of all the fonts.”
Hoefler cultivated a rolodex of graphic designers who became his clients, but he really rose to prominence in the late 1980s and early ’90s by designing typefaces for magazines, includingHarper’s Bazaar, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times Magazine. At the same time, Hoefler began selling fonts to individuals through his website, on which customers could print out an order form, fax in a request, and receive a disc of their desired fonts in the mail.
Citing the lawsuit, Hoefler declines to discuss any aspect of his relationship with Frere-Jones, including how they started working together or how things went sour; nor will he address any substantive issues in the complaint. Frere-Jones says that Hoefler began floating the idea of working together in the mid ’90s, jokingly proposing that they start a company called “Tobias and Jonathan’s Excellent Adventure (LLC).” One evening in 1999, Frere-Jones says Hoefler took him to the Gotham Bar and Grill and made a formal proposal that they become partners. Frere-Jones says the pitch centered largely on the idea that he wasn’t reaping the full benefit of his work at Font Bureau. He says he thought he was entering a full partnership in which the two would jointly control intellectual property, share business decisions, and have their names on the door.
His view was widely shared within the industry. When the two were awarded the AIGA medal last year, the company was described as a partnership. As part of the suit, Frere-Jones provided a series of e-mails in which Hoefler refers to Frere-Jones as a partner in communications with potential clients, the press, and Frere-Jones himself. “Never did it cross my mind that they weren’t equal partners,” says Bonnie Siegler of Eight and a Half, a designer who is friends with both men.
“If you go back and look at the old logo, you can see the deal that we made,” says Frere-Jones. “There are two names there—the same size, side by side, not one over the other.” While this is a compelling argument from a design perspective, it may not persuade a court. One place where Hoefler has never referred to Frere-Jones as his partner is on any kind of contract. In legal documents, the firm was described as the Hoefler Type Foundry, doing business as Hoefler&Frere-Jones. Frere-Jones says he never drafted paperwork to formalize the partnership he thought he was entering, nor did he hire a lawyer to examine the contract in which he signed over the rights to the fonts he had created at the Font Bureau for $10. In 2004 Frere-Jones also signed an employment agreement describing him as an employee of the firm. Both men agree that Frere-Jones signed this document, and the case is likely to turn in part on what the contract means—was he the firm’s employee? Or Hoefler’s?
Frere-Jones says that he agreed to this because Hoefler was always promising to formalize the partnership soon. In 2003 the two drew up a press release saying they had become full partners, according to Frere-Jones’s suit. It apparently never went out. There was always a project to be finished first, a commission on deadline, an aspect of the business that needed Hoefler’s urgent attention. Why would Frere-Jones allow 14 years to pass without formalizing such an important aspect of the business? He is at a loss to explain. “It would seem bizarre for this to not follow through, that we would just put all this work and patience into building this new company, and I put all this work into designing all of these typefaces,” he says. “It would, you know, it didn’t even occur to me that there would be some—you know. That I would get stonewalled.”
By Frere-Jones’s account, the situation reached a head last fall. He began pushing Hoefler to make his co-ownership of the business official earlier in 2013. On Oct. 21, he says Hoefler told him that a partnership was “not going to happen.” Frere-Jones began planning to leave and eventually departed in January.
While Hoefler declined to discuss when the fracture started, there is evidence that he also saw October as a turning point. Over two days, first on Oct. 21 and then again in early November, a handful of Web domains related to Hoefler and Frere-Jones’s names were purchased. Some of these, such as HoeflerCo.com, seem to hint at a company without Frere-Jones. Others are derived from Frere-Jones’ name, like TFJType.com, TFJFonts.com, and FJType.com. Anyone who types these URLs into a Web browser is now redirected to typography.com, the homepage of Hoefler&Co. When asked about the domain names, Hoefler writes in an e-mail: “The company maintains dozens of domains that are variations of its registered trademarks, in keeping with best practices.”
Jonathan Hoefler still works at the same building in which he set up shop 22 years ago, although he has more space. Hoefler&Co, as the firm is now called, operates out of a tidy office above a Crate & Barrel (a store that laid out its logo in Helvetica—except for the first letter, setting off a minor typographical controversy). Hoefler does not seem like a man going through a divorce. During a recent visit, he was all smiles as he pointed out attributes of various ampersands with help from books he pulled down from shelves. He recounted the untold genius of Henrik van de Keere, a 16th century Flemish punchcutter whose work is the basis for a font the company is working on; expounded on the difficulties of designing typefaces in non-Western scripts; and asked an employee to demonstrate code that automatically adds shadowing to letters, taking a repetitious task out of human hands.
Photograph by Kathy Willens/APFrere-Jones holds a promotional book in 2007 containing examples of the Gotham typeface
At this point, only about a quarter of Hoefler&Co’s workforce is dedicated to creating fonts. Hoefler brightens as he discusses the website, which he sees as a sort of
Bloomingdale’s (M) window for typefaces, an aspirational display that gets graphic designers fantasizing about dressing up their own work in new ways. The office also has a legal team dedicated to policing its intellectual property—like many forms of creativity, fonts are susceptible to piracy—and a sales staff.
While Hoefler is widely respected for his design work, he has also gained a reputation for having a keen business mind in an industry where such skills are rare. Former clients and colleagues say that he can be aggressive when he thinks he has been wronged. In 2005, the firm sued Joshua Darden, a former employee, for incorporating its fonts into his own work. “For many years I personally felt like I wouldn’t want to say anything public that would get back to him, because I feared his wrath,” says Chester Jenkins, a type designer who knows both men. “I don’t think there’s anyone I’ve talked to who hasn’t had a run-in with Jonathan.”
Several designers I spoke with said they were under the impression that Hoefler was almost exclusively focused on managing the business in recent years, leaving design to Frere-Jones. This makes it easy to cast Hoefler in the role of the villain exploiting the work of a naïve genius. But Hoefler and Frere-Jones’s relationship was more complicated than that, says Mike Essl, who teaches design at Cooper Union. Hoefler had all of Frere-Jones’s design chops, but also had the ability to propel Frere-Jones to prominence in a way he couldn’t have done on his own. Business partnerships rarely last forever, says Essl, and when they end, it’s often ugly. “Van Halen isn’t going to be Van Halen forever,” he says. “Someone is going to leave.”
Hoefler’s nonchalance about the break-up seems to stem from the feeling that he no longer needs Frere-Jones, whom he says he doesn’t plan to replace. When asked whether the company would miss Frere-Jones, Hoefler demurs. “Honestly, what we’re looking for next are people who can do new things that we’ve never done before. Typeface design is something we do very well,” he says. “To think about type design in the narrow confines of drawing alphabets doesn’t seem to me like a recipe for success.”
“Anybody who knows that design knows I drew it, but my name is nowhere on the stuff. I was just erased.”
If Gotham is the typeface signifying the union of Hoefler&Frere-Jones, Surveyor may symbolize their falling-out. Like Gotham, Surveyor was created in 2000 when a magazine—this time
Martha Stewart Living—approached Hoefler and Frere-Jones. The result was a “
warm and inviting voice, with the charm of the handmade but the credibility of a textbook,” according to the font’s website.
Both Hoefler and Frere-Jones claim artistic ownership of Surveyor. Hoefler says the typeface came from a sketch he drew in 1997, while Frere-Jones says he was the lead designer. In late March, Hoefler&Co made Surveyor available for licensing to the general public for the first time.
A license to use the full range of Surveyor fonts on a single computer and online costs $299. In Frere-Jones’s lawsuit, he values the rights to the fonts he signed over to the company at more than $3 million, and he says his overall share of the company is worth $20 million. Citing the lawsuit, Frere-Jones would not discuss how these numbers were derived. Hoefler disputes them. “We have no idea how he arrived at these speculative numbers,” he said in an e-mail. “They are certainly not the product of a formal valuation of the company or the fonts.”
While this is in some ways the center of the conflict between the two men, Hoefler may be holding something even more valuable to Frere-Jones: veto power over his ability to work. As part of the contract that Frere-Jones signed in 2004, he agreed to a clause prohibiting him from working for any competing companies for two years without the firm’s agreement. This is potentially a big problem for Frere-Jones, although it’s unclear if or how it could be enforced.
The legal fight is likely to drag out for months or years. Hoefler’s attorney filed a motion to dismiss the case, citing the 2004 employment agreement and saying Frere-Jones waited too long to raise grievances. In response, Frere-Jones provided the e-mails showing that Hoefler had described their business relationship as a partnership. A judge has not yet been assigned to the case.
As the lawsuit winds through the courts, Hoefler will continue to draw income from the firm’s past work, while Frere-Jones will not. Hoefler says that releasing Surveyor for license is a normal course of business. “We would never identify any of these typefaces as having an author,” he says. “If nothing else, it’s offensive to the team.”
Frere-Jones is slowly getting back to work. He started
his own website this week. He is also planning on launching his own firm. “I think it depends on how long it takes to get this situation worked out,” he says. Frere-Jones sees Hoefler’s decision to release Surveyor in the meantime as a slap in the face. “Anybody who knows that design knows I drew it, but my name is nowhere on the stuff,” he says. “I was just erased.”
