R-Typography is a type foundry based in Lisbon Portugal, founded by Rui Abreu in 2008 and now run together with Catarina Vaz.
Rui drew his first type designs while still working as a designer in advertising agencies. One day, he decided to send a design to to Peter Bruhn of...
David Jonathan Ross (DJR) had been working with The Font Bureau for nearly a decade, when he decided to start his own type foundry in 2016, now located in the hills of Western Massachusetts.
David’s typefaces literally come in all shapes and sizes, and in all of them, his l...
Bonjour Paris! The type design community in Paris is buzzing and today, we’re looking at one of the younger foundries that has already received a lot of praise. Interval Type is the foundry of art director and type designer Ilya Naumoff. Before he founded Interval Type, Ilya...
Newglyph is a type design studio based in Lausanne, Switzerland, founded by Ian Party and his team in 2019. If that name rings a bell, it’s because just yesterday, we looked at another foundry Ian co-founded: Swiss Typefaces. Newglyph is his latest endeavor and is focused on...
Many type foundries claim to be offering innovative designs and flexible type systems. But few deliver on this promise like Swiss Typefaces does. Founded in 2005 in Lausanne by Maxime Büchi and Ian Party (first as B&P type foundry), who were later joined by Emmanuel Rey,...
Sharp Type is a digital type foundry based in New York City and was founded in 2015 by Chantra Malee and Lucas Sharp. Chantra is in charge of strategy, brand management, graphic design, sales, and communication for the foundry, while Lucas acts as type director. Before he go...
Colophon Foundry is a foundry based on London founded by Anthony Sheret and Edd Harrington. The two designers started working together in 2009 in a shared graphic design studio in Brighton and began designing their own typefaces for the projects of their studio The Entente.
...
Commercial Type is a custom type design studio founded in 2007 by Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz, based in New York City and London. They have worked to build a growing library of excellent quality with “a balance between highly versatile ‘vanilla’ typefaces that can do ...
Hej! Time to look at the next type foundry and this time, we travel to Scandinavia. Letters from Sweden, founded by self taught type designer Göran Söderström in 2011, is based in Stockholm and designs retail and custom typefaces for local and international clients. Instead ...
Founded in 1993 by Cornel Windlin and Stephan Müller, Lineto is Switzerland’s first digital type foundry. Over the last three decades, Lineto has collaborated with type designers from all around the world and shaped one of the most impressive and high-quality libraries avail...
Sometimes, it can take quite a while for a foundry to finally become sustainable. Sometimes, like in the case of James Edmondson, it can take 17 type families.
James Edmondson started Ohno in 2015, “born from a love of expressive typography and craft.” And, as he shares in ...
Milieu Grotesque was founded in 2010 by graphic and type designers Timo Gaessner and Alexander Colby in Zurich. Today, the foundry is based in Lisbon, Portugal. Milieu Grotesque’s typefaces are versatile and system-oriented but also have a distinctive and often slightly quir...
TypeMates is a comparatively young foundry from Germany, founded in 2015 by Lisa Fischbach, Jakob Runge, and Nils Thomsen. Despite its young age, the foundry has already worked with large clients on custom typefaces and has managed to grow its catalogue of typefaces into an ...
For day three, we travel to New Zealand, where Klim Type Foundry was founded in 2005 by type designer Kris Sowersby. After having worked a while as a graphic designer, Kris was contacted by Chester Jenkins from Vllg who wanted to release Kris’ first typeface Feijoa. It was p...
Dinamo is another type foundry from Switzerland, founded by Fabian Harb and Johannes Breyer in Basel. After moving to Berlin for a few years, they now operate from different cities and via a network of satellite members across the globe. They don’t see themselves as a foundr...
We’ll start the advent calendar with one of the most successful foundries of the last decade. Grilli Type is a Swiss type foundry that was founded in 2009 by Noël Leu and Thierry Blancpain. Today, the studio numbers eight people dispersed all across the globe. The foundry is...
The independent type design community has grown tremendously over the last couple of years and the quality and variety of fonts is truly breathtaking. A little while ago, I started jotting down a few type foundries to have a list that I could come back to whenever I was in n...
I just had a casual chat with ChatGPT that I wanted to share with you. Many of the things I asked and the answers I received are related to a talk I gave last week at CSS Café. I wanted to know what an algorithm might think about all of this.
Decide for yourself where this...
Since the first days of the Web, people have been thinking and debating hard about the best ways forward. The network, the protocols, the browsers, the documents, HTML, CSS, and Javascript – all those things are the result of years of countless discussions, fights, mistakes,...
Twitter is not well. Many of us were worried that Elon Musk might rapidly change the face of the platform. But only very few expected things to go down so rapidly. After the latest deadline to respond whether they want to stay, it looks like about 75 % of the remaining workf...
The bird is not well. So it is time to request and download an archive of your Twitter data now, if you haven’t done this recently. After you have requested your archive, it can take a while until you receive it. I requested my archive on the day Elon walked in and got an em...
When author Jim Collins first met his hero Peter Drucker, whom many regard as the greatest management thinker of all time, the two men where at very different points in their lives. Here, a man in his thirties, eager to start a new endeavor, a new self-directed path, but equ...
It takes years to become good at it. So we read books, take classes, and visit workshops to become better. And still, it may take a lifetime to master it. But more than anything, it is one of the things that makes us human:
Writing.
But now, the algorithms are coming for u...
The hellsite has a new king. And so, many are moving from Twitter to other social networks like micro.blog or Mastodon or are at least trying out those other options while waiting how things might develop.
Cross-posting – or not?
One of the first questions that comes to mi...
It could happen out of the blue, without any warning. It could happen without you knowing what you did wrong. It could happen today.
Twitter could just suspend you.
Gone. Your Tweets, your followers, your thoughts, your jokes, your conversations. They’re just gone.
Gone, ...
I bet you know this: You’ve created something – a drawing, a layout, a video, a piece of code, or a blog post – and after you’re more or less done, you pause and you look at it. And you don’t like it.
Maybe it is a little detail that is not right, or maybe you don’t like th...
I love building prototypes. They allow me to explore and sketch ideas, test my assumptions, and try out things at an early stage to make better design decisions.
Prototyping is the single best tool we have in our toolbox as designers and developers. And because anything can...
I couldn’t agree more to what Dave wrote in his recent blog post about the increasing demands of the front-end web: the job of a front-end developer is getting ever more complex. From writing well-structured, semantic HTML to the latest (fantastic) new CSS features, to acces...
Please use whatever tool gets the job done and makes sense for you.
But then again, I’ve seen so many frameworks and tools come and go that it can be dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket. You know what really is time well spent and a worthy investment into your future, your career, and your team? Learning the basics and becoming really good at them.
Therefore, don’t let tools cover up weak spots in your or your team’s knowledge. Because what looks like a flaw at first glance is actually an opportunity to learn and improve.
And don’t let any tool make you believe that it isn’t worthwhile to learn the foundations of web technology or let it stop you from participating in the vital dialogue that pushes the platform and its standards forward.
