THIS IS TOTALLY COPIED AND PASTED AND NEEDS REWORKED BEFORE IT IF POSTED.
There are three main types of end user licenses when it comes to fonts (and designs): Personal Use Only, Commercial Use and Public Domain.
Personal Use Only
Personal Use Only fonts may be downloaded and installed on your computer. You may use it to design art for yourself but it may not be used in commerce.
Personal use only means you can use the font for something you make for yourself or as a gift. You can not profit off the item and it can not be used in commerce. Personal use fonts include fonts that come pre-installed on your computer.
Commercial Use Fonts
Commercial Use means you can use the font on items you sell. For example, you could create a design that involves that font. You could sell a shirt that uses that design. You could even sell the digital design…for personal use.
What you can NOT do with a commercial use font is sell the design you just created, using the font you purchased, as commercial use file. The reason is – you are then extending the commercial use license to the person who buys the design from you…yet they don’t have the commercial license to the font unless they also buy it from the original designer!
For example, let’s say you purchased The Hungry JPEG’s May bundle. With that purchase YOU get the commercial license for all the fonts and graphics included. So you go through the bundle and decide to create a design using Manhattan font. You will sell that design in your shop in a physical form – on a shirt, say. You decide to also use that SAME digital design (which includes text) to sell as a downloadable PNG or whatever format you decide. You can ONLY sell that design with the personal use license because only YOU own the commercial rights to it – NOT the buyer. If that buyer purchases the digital design and then sells it – they are doing so illegally because they don’t have the commercial license – YOU do.
Public Domain Fonts for Bible Journalers
Okay so how do you ever sell commercial use designs of your own? You can do one or two things: you can hand letter your text-based designs and use public domain fonts for any text involved.
Public Domain fonts and designs are those creative works that the original creator has given up any type of intellectual property. Essentially anyone can use public domain fonts anyway they wish. That means if you create a digital design you can not only sell it, but offer it with the commercial use license so the buyer can also use it on physical items he or she sells. Make sure you clarify that in your commercial use license because you don’t want the person who buys a digital design from you re-selling it in digital format.
So the burning question now is: how do you find public domain fonts? There’s actually a filter on the font website DaFont.com that let’s you sort to only view Public Domain fonts. In a nutshell, go to DaFont.com > click a Font Category > click “More Options” > Check the box for Public Domain > Click ‘Submit.’ Only those fonts that are available in the public domain in that category will display.
