Font Licensing for the brand center

Fonts are a kind of software. Like many other kinds of software, you get a license to use font files instead of buying them. Different vendors have different licenses for their fonts, but most licenses, including the ones for the fonts Microsoft provides with applications and Windows, don't let you put the fonts in applications or share them with others.

Any font used in Microsoft 365 applications requires a font license that covers the conditions of font usage for the intended product. This could include a webfont license, application license, desktop license, server license, or several other license types.

Warning

By using this feature and publishing font files, a font catalog is created. The newly created font catalog files are publicly stored, along with the fonts, in the cloud and won't respect the site classification guidelines if the Organization Asset Library is hosted in Restricted SharePoint Site. The font catalog files contain font names and other font related metadata. The files are accessible to anyone, even people outside of your organization, who can get the URLs that link to them.

Don't use this feature if your fonts contain proprietary information, or if they have license usage restrictions, such as restrictions on cloud hosting, or your organization isn't comfortable making the fonts publicly available.

Microsoft provided fonts

Microsoft provides a set of fonts for usage in Microsoft 365 applications. A Microsoft 365 application can use the fonts to render content to a screen, allow that content to be edited, and allow that content to be output to a device, like a printer. 

Some of the fonts supplied with the Brand center were created specifically for Microsoft by leading type designers and type design companies (known as font foundries). Other fonts were licensed to Microsoft from font foundries for inclusion with Microsoft 365 applications.

Reference: Cloud fonts in Office - Microsoft Support

Note

Microsoft provided fonts are available to Microsoft 365 subscribers.

Custom brand fonts

For fonts obtained elsewhere or supplied with other apps, you'll need to review the license agreements that accompany those applications.

Why must I dig up and read those agreements?

We're sorry, but Microsoft can’t provide guidance to fonts that we didn’t supply.

The rights we provide you for Windows supplied fonts are considered quite broad, and it’s possible that other font licenses, even some free ones, may be more restrictive.

Some font foundries may give away “free” versions of fonts with limited licenses and make their money selling extended rights.

Some font licenses may restrict commercial use, require attribution, and restrict redistribution or commercial redistribution of documents that include embedded versions of the font.