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Comment by bww | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat related: the saga between Hoefler and former partner Frere-Jones, who Hoefler almost certainly attempted to (and perhaps successfully) screwed over.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3036423/type-stars-jonathan-hoef...

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What a sad affair. Interviews and documentaries clearly demonstrating their relationship as partners, without a hierarchy. Then one baldly asserts his ownership rights, and the other realizes the naive trust he'd put in his colleague was vapor.

Doesn't square with the chronology below:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28560980

That's not an accurate chronology.

How so? Frere-Jones comes later, but becomes vital to the new state of the business. 15 years together!

See 37signals for another such example: design studio, but oh, software is where we shine, but I need this tech fellow as full partner.

The chronology doesn't really tell the full story. Hoefler made some stand out typefaces, but many of the commercial successes and culturally iconic fonts were designed by Frere-Jones by himself or in partnership with Hoefler. Gotham is the biggest example, but Whitney, Surveyor, Archer, Vitesse and others were either FJ or collaboration work.

It's quite fair to say that Hoefler would not be in the position he is today without Frere-Jones, and by many accounts, and even how Hoefler presented things in the press, they were a partnership. Even before they started officially working together, Hoefler was consulting Frere-Jones on ideas, such as on Knockout - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/arts/11iht-design11.html

It's not like Hoefler's foundry was a juggernaut when Frere-Jones began contributing to his work, or even when he joined the company. They had several success stories - but so did FJ prior to that - and both of their largest successes all came when they were working together.

This story is almost seven years old. These guys settled their dispute and moved on. Frere Jones now has a very successful type company of his own. He's not exactly living in a van by the river

It's been decades since the Beatles broke up, but there's still people who (fairly or otherwise) nurse a grudge about it. Sure, nobody would ever claim H&FJ were "bigger than Jesus", but at least in a certain demographic they were pretty big.

Have they really put it behind them? Hoefler doesn't so much as acknowledge Frere-Jones in his post.

And one of Frere-Jones' type designers had this to say about the whole thing:

https://twitter.com/ninastoessinger/status/14382710868446822...

Can’t agree more with this tweet. It was amazing fonts directed by Frere-Jones that created almost all the value for H&F-J.

I’m FJ’s side in this whole saga, but you’re minimizing Jonathan Hoefler’s contributions a bit: it’s true that Frere-Jones made Gotham, but Hoefler has made many iconic typefaces as well. Hoefler Text, obviously, but my favorite is probably Champion Gothic (think “Straight Outta Compton”).

It’s not Wozniak/Jobs situation where one of them was a creative genius and the other a cold-blooded businessman: they’re both creative geniuses. One of them just screwed the other one over.

The (public) court documents, if anyone wants to read through them: https://www.gwern.net/docs/design/2014-650139-tobiasfrerejon...

There's some pretty spicy and entertaining comments in the various briefs and discussions. My own overall impression is that it looks extremely bad for Hoefler, and he probably settled because his best defense, after all of the emails and documents produced, was "I totally did defraud Frere-Jones, but the statute of limitations protects me", which is... a bad look and a bad reason to win.

Also of interest (and quite a bad look too when you know about the usual camaraderie in the type design community) "The Hoefler Type Foundry vs. Darden, Joshua" https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet...

Frere-Jones has his own company https://frerejones.com/

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