For day 21, we’re back in Berlin, where a young graphic designer with a love for type decided in 2008 to make his passion his full-time job. Today, Hannes von Döhren’s type foundry called HvD Fonts sells a wide range of typefaces, some of them being hugely popular designs. The ca … | Continue reading
Tobias Frere-Jones is one of the most accomplished type designers in the world. He worked at Font Bureau in Boston where he designed modern classics like Benton Sans or Interstate. He later returned to his hometown New York City and, at Hoefler & Frere-Jones, created timeless des … | Continue reading
Fontwerk was founded in 2019 by Ivo Gabrowitsch in Berlin. Building on his excellent network and years of experience as marketing director at FontShop and Monotype, Ivo has assembled a permanent team of great designers and font engineers that also regularly collaborates with a fr … | Continue reading
Vectro is a type design studio based in Portland founded in 2021 by Lizy Gershenzon and Travis Kochel. The two have been running the design studio Scribble Tone for several years but their most-noticed project (and company) is probably Future Fonts, a platform for experimental, h … | Continue reading
You probably have seen several of his typefaces on MyFonts before. Maybe you even purchased one or more of them. For almost 10 years, he was selling his fonts on Monotype platforms. This year, Berlin-born and -based designer René Bieder launched his own independent shop for his t … | Continue reading
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 the S … | Continue reading
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 love fo … | Continue reading
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 was … | Continue reading
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 “the … | Continue reading
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, the foun … | Continue reading
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 got int … | Continue reading
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. … | Continue reading
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 whate … | Continue reading
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 of fo … | Continue reading
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 available. … | Continue reading
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 a wond … | Continue reading
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 quirky ch … | Continue reading
TypeMates is a comparatively young foundry from Germany, founded in 2015 by Lisa Fischbach, Jakob Runge, and Nils Thomsen. Despite their young age, the foundry has already worked with large clients on custom typefaces and has managed to grow its catalogue of typefaces into an imp … | Continue reading
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 publis … | Continue reading
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 foundry onl … | Continue reading
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 need o … | Continue reading
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 know … | Continue reading
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 sits … | Continue reading
Websites, oh websites! Thou art a vast and wondrous realm, filled with knowledge and information to be explored. Thou art a tool for communication and connection, allowing us to share our thoughts and ideas with others across the globe. Thou art a source of entertainment and d … | Continue reading
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, and … | Continue reading
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 workforce … | Continue reading
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 email n … | Continue reading
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 equally … | Continue reading
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 us. Arti … | Continue reading
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 mind is: … | Continue reading
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, not beca … | Continue reading
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 the whol … | Continue reading
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 be a … | Continue reading
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 accessibil … | Continue reading
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, y … | Continue reading
p code { font-size: 80%; } There are many ways to adjust your CSS code to a browser’s support for a specific CSS feature. If you want to check if a certain property is supported, you can write a feature query using the @supports at-rule, for example: @supports … | Continue reading
I’m right with Dave on this one! I’m tired of environmental responsibility always falling on the consumer. I know consumer demand bubbles up into societal change, I’m willing to do my part. But as a consumer it feels like I’m throwing time and money at a solution without a … | Continue reading
p code { font-size: 80%; } You probably know this situation. You are working on a project and one of the npm packages you are working with contains a nasty bug or is lacking a critical feature. Of course, you first head over to the repository, e.g. on GitHub, and draf … | Continue reading
Matthias Ott is an independent user experience designer and developer from Stuttgart, Germany. Besides design practice he teaches Interface Prototyping at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Kiel. | Continue reading
Providing a proper document outline is one of the most effective things you can do to improve the accessibility of your HTML. Like the headings of the chapters and subchapters in a book, the structure of the heading elements in our HTML should have a semantic, tree-like structure … | Continue reading
Yesterday, I shared how to test a whole website for accessibility issues with Pa11y and how to output the results as HTML. I also shared the link on Twitter, as I usually do, and Darek Kay chimed in, mentioning an alternative tool he created: Evaluatory. Just like Pa11y, Evaluato … | Continue reading
p code { font-size: 80%; } This week, I’m doing an accessibility audit for a client. One of the first steps is to have a general look at the site. You can – and should – do that manually for sure, but another very useful way to get a good first impression of how good … | Continue reading
The Cascade is legendary. Legendary because it is the C in CSS. Legendary in how well it works to determine which selector wins when browsers apply styles to HTML. And legendary in how little many of us really know about it. Bramus van Damme recently gave a fantastic talk about t … | Continue reading
What’s the single best thing you can do if you want to learn a new tool or evaluate a new technology? Right, it’s getting your hands dirty. Only by building something tangible, like a realistic prototype or even a real project, you’ll get immediate answers to the questions that a … | Continue reading
Who should you write for? Your friends and family? Your colleagues and peers? The people you look up to? Everyone in the community? Everyone on the Internet? The answer? None of those people. You should only write for one person and one person only: you. Me? But who would read t … | Continue reading
I love reading posts in which people talk about recent updates to their personal sites. It does three things: It shows the person reading your post that you care about this little corner of the Web and that it is worth doing so. It (most often) demonstrates why you picked a cert … | Continue reading
One of the most fascinating things about the Web is how it has evolved. By that, I don’t mean so much the mind-blowing speed of growth, but rather how the foundational languages, APIs, and browsers have been able to adapt to an ever-evolving, ever-changing environment. With all t … | Continue reading
Even if you have been posting on your own site for quite some time, blogging regularly can still be challenging. Ask almost anyone who blogs and they will probably tell you the same: They would very much like to hit that publish button more often, but, somehow, it just doesn’t ha … | Continue reading