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62% of respondents rank missing or mismatched fonts among their top three workflow pain points as brands manage increasingly distributed creative operations
New research from Monotype highlights the operational challenges organizations face in maintaining consistent brand identities as creative work becomes increasingly distributed across teams, platforms, agencies, and markets.
The study of mid-market and large organizations found that 62% of respondents identified missing or mismatched fonts among their top three workflow pain points, while 56% said their organizations source font intellectual property through multiple creative platforms.
The findings point to a broader challenge in brand management: ensuring that approved creative assets remain accessible, properly licensed, and consistently used as they move through increasingly complex workflows.
Font Management Extends Beyond the Brand Team
More than half of respondents said their organizations source font IP through multiple creative platforms, compared with 38% that rely on a single platform. Other organizations work with agencies or directly with font foundries.
This distributed model can make it harder for teams to identify the correct fonts, access approved versions, and understand usage rights across different projects and technologies.
“A brand today is expressed by far more people than just the team that creates it,” said James Potter, Chief Operations Officer at Monotype. He said the research demonstrates how brand consistency depends on systems that allow teams to find, access, and use the right assets across teams, technologies, partners, and markets.
Five Priorities Shape Font Management
Respondents identified several priorities associated with managing typography across creative operations, including brand fidelity, risk mitigation, availability, visibility and controls, and workflow efficiency.
These priorities reflect the growing distance between the teams that establish brand standards and the employees, agencies, and partners responsible for applying them across finished materials.
Rather than relying solely on a centralized brand team, organizations increasingly need systems that make approved typography easy to locate and use within the tools where creative work is produced.
Fonts Combine Creative and Operational Requirements
Fonts occupy a unique position within brand systems because they function both as visual assets and software governed by licensing requirements and technical constraints.
Typography may need to operate across different applications, devices, teams, languages, and geographic markets. Gaps in font management can therefore lead to substituted or unavailable fonts, licensing issues, and inconsistencies in how a brand is represented.
The research found that organizations are looking beyond simple access to font files. Teams also need visibility into which typefaces are being used, whether they are appropriately licensed, whether approved versions are available, and how consistently they are deployed.
Research Builds on Earlier Creative Operations Findings
The findings build on Monotype and Extensis’ 2025 Scaling Creative Operations research, which found that 82% of surveyed creative professionals considered font management critical to their creative operations.
The latest research provides additional insight into the operational issues contributing to that concern, particularly as creative work moves across more platforms, teams, and external partners.
The combined findings suggest that maintaining brand consistency increasingly depends not only on defining brand guidelines but also on the systems and workflows used to implement them. As creative operations become more distributed, font management is becoming an increasingly important part of maintaining brand fidelity across customer-facing experiences.
