Heads up, folks. On June 15, 2020 a number of fonts will be retired from Adobe’s Creative Cloud. In total, about 50 families/700 fonts from the foundries Font Bureau and Carter & Cone will no longer be available to sync. You can find more details in this post on the Adobe Support Community site.
It’s not the first time Adobe Fonts have gone away. Back in March, House Industries fonts were retired after 3 years of being offered in Typekit/Adobe Fonts. Here’s the official FAQ from Adobe on font retirement.
For InDesign users, this is potentially a very big (and bad) deal if you used those fonts in your projects. While the files for Adobe Fonts you’ve synced do reside on your computer, you can’t legally package them when you archive a project. So if you use fonts that get retired you’ll need to acquire new licenses for them from the foundry or change the fonts used in your files. The first option can be very expensive. The second one can be a production nightmare with text reflowing and going overset, glyphs disappearing, etc. So even if the new version of a project only required minor edits, you’ll need to plan for fixing and proofing the whole thing…which can also be very expensive.
Templates May Be Affected
Note that font retirement also affects InDesign templates, both those on Adobe Stock and potentially ones offered here. Though to date, I’m not aware of any fonts we’ve used in our premium templates being retired. This is obviously less of a problem if you’re starting a new project where you can simply pick a different font to begin with. From now on, in our templates we will use only fonts from Adobe (not the other foundries on Creative Cloud) and sources that seem stable (like Font Squirrel), to avoid the retirement problem.
Please don’t get me wrong; I’m not writing this post to criticize Adobe. I understand things change in business relationships, so it doesn’t surprise me that agreements between Adobe and font foundries don’t last forever. That’s life. There’s nothing in a Creative Cloud license that guarantees perpetual access to anything, including fonts. You pay your money and you take your chances. But I do think this is a significant drawback of using certain Adobe Fonts, that needs to be brought to the attention of every InDesign user before the problem affects them, which is why I’m writing this as a heads up. Be mindful of the retirement risk when you use Adobe Fonts (at least those from other foundries).
This article was last modified on February 17, 2021
This article was first published on May 15, 2020
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