Logos and all of their related designs may be protected by copyright, by way of various intellectual property organizations worldwide which make available application procedures to register a design to give it protection by law. For example, in the UK, the Intellectual Property Office (United Kingdom) governs registered designs, patents, and trademarks. Ordinarily, the trademark registration will not ‘make claim’ to colors used, meaning it is the visual design that will be protected, even if it is reproduced in a variety of other colors or backgrounds. In some countries, especially civil law countries, the threshold of originality required for copyright protection can be quite high so a logo that contains simple geometric shapes or texts might not be eligible for copyright protection although it can be protected as a trademark.
A typeface is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly. The art and craft of designing typefaces is called type design. Designers of typefaces are called type designers and are often employed by type foundries. In desktop publishing, type designers are sometimes also called font developers or font designers. Every typeface is a collection of glyphs, each of which represents an individual letter, number, punctuation mark, or another symbol. The same glyph may be used for characters from different scripts, e.g. Roman uppercase A looks the same as Cyrillic uppercase А and Greek uppercase alpha. There are typefaces tailored for special applications, such as cartography, astrology, or mathematics.
