Typefoundries and Corporate Social Responsibility.

zukuya's picture

Hello to all.
I have the next question derived from a discussion in the russian typographic forum http://community.livejournal.com/ru_typography/. How can a typefoundry participate in a Corporate Social Responsibility? Particularly I am interested: can be the elaboration of free types (or a permission to use comercial type in free project without any cost) considered as such type of activities? It will be very interesting to know the western foundries approaches.
Yours
Vad

Jackson's picture

This immediately made me think of the HFJ interview on Type Radio, "on earth day this year I ordered 6 million pieces of paper". http://www.typeradio.org/cgi-bin/search/search.pl?Realm=&Match=0&Terms=H...

Nick Shinn's picture

can be the elaboration of free types (or a permission to use comercial type in free project without any cost) considered as such type of activities?

No.
Responsible behavior is not the same as charitable behavior.
Corporate responsibility means being law-abiding, nice to employees, supporting fair trade, and not polluting the environment too much.
This is not the same as giving away free products.

zukuya's picture

Thank you for your answer, Nick.
Lets see Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_social_responsibility): "[...]Furthermore, CSR-focused businesses would proactively promote the public interest by encouraging community growth and development, and voluntarily eliminating practices that harm the public sphere, regardless of legality.[...]". So if actively contribute with your fonts to the wellbeing of the society (making well legible and attractive signs [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_Broken_Windows], by the edition of free text books [there is an approach named philantropy], and so on), this couldn´t be considered responsible behavior? ("[...]An approach for CSR that is becoming more widely accepted is community-based development approach. In this approach, corporations work with local communities to better themselves. [...]")

Nick Shinn's picture

...this couldn´t be considered responsible behavior?

No.
It is not the responsibility of corporations to engage in charity or philanthropy.
It is their responsibility to conduct business in an ethical, legal manner.

The concept of CSR was developed by Public Relations specialists for businesses that are large and dangerous enough to have issues which could damage their profitability, through negative public opinion, employee disruption or government crack-down.
It is a way for big business to professionally manage such issues and minimize the heavy hand of government, by self-regulation.
It is a form of damage control.
Some of the biggest proponents of CSR are resource extraction multi-nationals that disrupt poor communities with toxic programs of exploration and extraction; "community development" is how they buy off local resistance.

CSR is for a different scale and kind of business than those which publish digital fonts.

Of course, it applies to software giants such as Microsoft, Apple and Adobe, which have small type departments.
These already give away free fonts!--which they do not because it's their responsibility for the well-being of society, but because free (bundled) fonts make it easier for customers to use their big money-makers -- computer hardware, operating systems, and major applications.

For an example of charity from foundries, consider Font Aid.

Fonts can certainly damage the public sphere, but only through their mis-use, so again, no responsibility to foundries.

A type foundry does have responsibilities to society -- to make sure that its fonts work correctly (i.e. the characters are correctly encoded and well-made) and to avoid plagiarism.

So for the majority of foundries, ethics is more about the professionalism of the type designers who own the companies, than it is about "giving back" to society -- especially as type foundries do not have the huge revenue that generally spawns corporate largesse.

If a foundry has any social responsibility, it is to support its own niche of society, e.g. by sponsoring events such as TypeCon and the ATypI conference.

zukuya's picture

Thank you again, Nick. It is clear for me.
With the best wishes
Vad

Syndicate content Syndicate content