Text to use in motion graphics/ broadcast design…

[Joseph W. bourke]

Jimmy –
I have never run into any legal issues with the fontsets that I use. There are so many similar ones out there, mostly because of the fact that you can license a font NAME, but you can’t license a font DESIGN. Therefore people just copy a typeface they want, give it a new name, and put it on a fonts shareware sites. There are literally thousands of free fonts out there (search on free and fonts and see what I mean) that you would be absolutely safe with. The only caveat with free fonts is that often the ones that are free don’t have a complete unicode set; in other words, there might be a capital W missing, or something that would make you pay down the road if you want full functionality.

The real issue you will run into is with serif faces that “strobe”. Any typeface with fine serifs (that are angled or have strokes smaller than an NTSC scanline) can cause the strobing effect, similar to the “marching ants” on a selection tool. It makes the type hard to read and detracts from the rest of screen. The general rule is to use san-serif or slab-serif fonts in TV production. That way you won’t run into problems. If you have to use a serif font, try for the “bold” or “black” version; you’ll have fewer problems.

Issue three: the “legal” issue, has to do with FCC rules for using mouse-type at the bottom of the screen, especially political ads and stuff that has disclaimers. There are FCC rules that you can search for online – I don’t know the type size off the top of my head, but there’s a minimum type size in scanlines that you can’t go below. I hope this helps.

Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV