Scene hook
Last week, when I sent a proposal from a coffee shop, what scared me most wasn’t the client rejecting it. It was the file getting casually tossed into AI and rewritten.
I’ve been stuck on this too: a training outline I worked hard on turned into a version the next day that looked “kind of like me, but not really me,” even carrying over the typos. That feeling of helplessness is very real.
What this tool/method is + who is already using it
Decoy Font is basically a font experiment that adds a “misdirection layer” to text: human eyes can usually still read it, but machines are more likely to make mistakes when recognizing or extracting it. It’s not encryption, and it’s definitely not a magical anti-copy solution. It’s more like adding a bit of friction to sensitive text.
Last Tuesday at 10 p.m., in a coworking office in Binjiang, Hangzhou, Lin Wei, who sells knowledge products, tried this on two pages of a course outline before exporting the PDF she planned to send a client the next day. Her thinking was simple: not to block everything completely, just to stop someone from throwing it into AI with one click and washing it into something “of their own.” I got this wrong before too. I thought using a font like this meant everything was safe. Later I realized it’s better for “blocking the first easy move,” not for “locking everything down.”
What it costs to try today
Money: $0. Time: 15–30 minutes. Technical barrier: being able to change a font and export a PDF is enough. No code, no intimidating developer setup.
First step: open the experiment page, click the trial or download entry, and apply it to a short passage you most don’t want machines to copy badly. Then read it yourself once, and send it to a friend to read once too. If even you find it tiring to read, I’d hold off on using it in real client materials. Not everyone needs this tool: if your content is already sold publicly or shared publicly, it’s fine not to test it right now.
Advice by stage
If you’re just getting started, I’d begin with small tests on things like the footer of a quote, a course table of contents, or a collaboration process diagram. I wouldn’t switch an entire document all at once.
If you already have 1–2 clients, I’d use it on parts that are “meant to be seen, but not casually reworked,” like proposal summaries, delivery frameworks, or interview outlines, while keeping a normal-font version as backup.
If you’re scaling up, I’d treat it as one layer in a document-tiering system: send the public version normally, add a little friction like this to the semi-public version, and keep truly core processes and client data inside permission controls. It can help lower our anxiety, but I wouldn’t put all my sense of security on a single font.