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Type Design ResourcesType Design Resources — ↑ Learning type design Beginners guides to type design Books Workshops Courses Full-time programs Coaching Software Commercial font editors Free and open source (FOSS) font editors Community Groups Conferences Events & Lectures Associations Media Podcasts Publications Blogs Streamers Character design Latin Italics & Obliques Cyrillic Greek Hebrew Canadian Syllabics Math symbols Box drawing characters OpenType feature programming Language support Standardized character sets Encoding borders and ornaments Python and coding Learn Python with DrawBot Python scripting in Glyphs Python scripting and extensions in RoboFont Git and version control Hinting Kerning tools Proofing tools Font proofing software Printer recommendations Web-based proofing and testing Proofing texts Font engineering What is font engineering? Tools for font engineering Type specimens Historic type specimens Naming your font Open-source your fonts Open source type foundries Selling your fonts Marketplaces & distributors Learn about licensing Criticising the status quo Innovative licensing: pricing based on company size Innovative licensing: all-in-one licenses License enforcement Starting a foundry Running a type foundry Type foundry directories E-commerce platforms Website platforms Web specimen tools Font tools for web development Type testers Custom foundry site design and/or development Business coaching See also… Type Design Resources A growing, public, collaborative collection of type design resources. Everything from learning the basics to running your own foundry. To contribute, post an issue or make a pull request on the Github repo, or email [enable JavaScript to view email] Learning type design Beginners guides to type design Design with FontForge This is a fantastic introduction to type design, regardless of what software you use. Getting started with type design by Jonathan Hoefler Glyphs Tutorials most tutorials here would be useful to non-Glyphs users too! GT Academy Ongoing series of Instagram posts on how to construct certain glyphs. Learning Type Design A beginner type design course by Charles Nix on LinkedIn Learning. Ohno Essential RoboFont Video class introduction to the classic editor Ohno Type School Articles Series of articles teaching the basics of type design. Type Design School Video guide by Lynne Yun Books Designing Fonts: An Introduction to Professional Type Design by Chris Campe and Ulrike Rausch. A German edition is also available. Designing Type by Karen Cheng. How to create typefaces: From sketch to screen by Cristóbal Henestrosa, Laura Meseguer, José Scaglione. Also available in a Spanish edition. How to design fonts? A 140-page PDF and print-on-demand book by Blaze Type Foundry. Italic: What gives Typography its emphasis by Hendrik Weber. Also available in German. Legibility: How and why typography affects ease of reading Book by Mary Dyson. Available online for free in English and Spanish. English version Spanish version Recommended Type Design and Typography Books discussion on TypeDrawers Teachers, show us your reading lists discussion on typedrawers The Ohno Book: A Serious Guide to Irreverent Type Design by James Edmondson. Workshops Tip: follow your favourite type conferences – some of them present workshops and other events throughout the year. Cyrillicsly workshops for learning Cyrillic type design Letterform Archive presents a variety of workshops and other events Type Design Class Online workshops by Viktor Baltus for learning type design and typography. Type@Cooper presents a variety of workshops and other events Typographische Gesellschaft München Typographic Society of Munich hosts a wide range of in-person workshops and courses on typography, including type design. Courses Expert class Type design An online, comprehensive course on type design offered by The Plantin Institute of Typography. I Love Typography Academy ILT academy exists to promote expert teaching of type design, font production, and typography. Courses cover various script systems and are taught in a number of languages. Knuth-Bigelow Type Design Incubator The Donald Knuth & Charles Bigelow Type Design Incubator (KBI) is a 5-week type design course. SILICON is a Stanford University initiative to advance digital inclusion and protect lower-resourced languages from extinction. Ohno Type School Courses A series of free courses for RoboFont users. Plau Education A collection of courses in Brazilian Portuguese by Brazilian type foundry Plau. Includes FontePro, a basic type design course. Practica Program A two-part, 6 week + 18 week part-time program for learning type design. Tipo-g A type design school in Barcelona, Spain. Currently teaching a 21-week part-time program with an emphasis on variable fonts. Type Design Class Self-guided courses by Viktor Baltus for learning type design and typography. Type Electives An online school with a range of type design and typography courses. TypeDesign.Asia A part-time 9-week online type design course, offered with various levels of coaching and mentorship. Typemasters Typemasters by Leinster Type offers type design courses, workshops, and coaching services. TypeParis A 6-week intensive type design programme held each summer in Paris (in English). Variable Font Course An on-demand video course by Arthur Reinders Folmer on creating variable fonts, and variable colour fonts. Full-time programs ANRT at ENSAD (Nancy, France) ECAL A two-year master’s degree program in Switzerland. EsadType at Esad Amiens (Amiens, France) MATD at University of Reading (Reading, UK) Type & Media MA in Type Design at the KABK (The Hague, Netherlands) Type West at Letterform Archive (San Francisco, USA) Type@Cooper at Cooper Union (New York City, USA) Coaching ILT Academy Consulting Design consulting and tutoring for type designers and foundry teams. Typemasters Typemasters by Leinster Type offers a range of design coaching services for type designers and foundry teams. Software Discounted student licenses are available with many of these applications. Commercial font editors Drop & Type An application that generates Japanese or Latin fonts from Adobe Illustrator files. ¥4,000 JPY Windows Mac FontArk A browser-based font editor that’s currently in open beta. Free (while in beta) FontLab An all-in-one font editor for Mac and Windows – first released in 1992. $499 USD Windows Mac Fontself Plugins for Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop for creating fonts within Creative Suite. Also available as an iPad app. $39–59 USD Windows Mac iPad Glyphs A fully-featured, Mac-based font editor with an active community. €299 Mac Glyphs Mini A paired down version of the full Glyphs app, meant for beginners. Limited to designing single-style fonts (no multiple masters or variable fonts). €49 Mac High Logic Font Creator A Windows-native font editor. $49–199 USD Windows RoboFont A Python-based font editor that puts an emphasis on scripting and extendability. €400 Mac TypeTool A simpler font editor for beginners, from the makers of FontLab. $49 USD Windows Free and open source (FOSS) font editors Birdfont A cross-platform, pay-what-you-want font editor written in the Vala programming language. Paid “Plus” version can export Color fonts, OpenType-CFF fonts, and single stroke fonts for CNC. Windows Mac Linux BSD FontForge A cross-platform, FOSS font editor written in C. Can export many formats. First released in 1994. Free Windows Mac GNU+Linux. Fontra A browser-based FOSS font editor that allows distributed teams to work on a font together. Currently unfinished and in development (2023). Developed by Black[Foundry] and Google Fonts. GitHub FontStruct FontStruct lets you quickly and easily create modular fonts constructed out of geometrical shapes, which are arranged in a grid pattern, like tiles or bricks. Gerb A FOSS font editor written in Rust. Currently unfinished and in development (2023). Glyphr Studio A browser-based FOSS font editor. GitHub Modular Font Editor K A modular, Rust-based, FOSS font editor. Currently unfinished and in development (2023). Runebender A FOSS font editor, also written in Rust. Currently unfinished and in development (2023). TruFont (discontinued) A cross-platform FOSS font editor, written in Python. Now discontinued (2023). Windows Mac Linux GitHub Typlr.app A browser-based font editor by Evgeny Agasyants, currently in open beta. Community Groups Alphacrit Online event series of type critiques, by Alphabettes Fonts r Magic an informal weekly Zoom meeting for type designers to chat and show their work, hosted on Friday afternoons by Mirko Velimirovic. Posting Zoom links publicly is probably asking for trouble, so I’d say just send Mirko a DM to join! Type Crit Crew a free resource for type design students to meet 1–1 with experienced type designers for virtual critiques Type Twitter a list of over 400 type foundries to follow on Twitter TypeDrawers discussion forum for type designers Conferences ATypI A global type conference, hosted in a different country each year in September. DiaTipo A large community gathering for typography in Latin America, held annually in São Paulo & Belém do Pará. Archived conference websites Dynamic Font Day A conference on digital typography and technology, presented by Typographische Gesellschaft München (Typographic Society of Munich). Face/Interface Global conference on type design and human-computer interaction, hosted by Stanford University. Fontstand Conference Annual typography conference organized by Fontstand, the typeface discovery and rental app. Future of Reading Conference about the future of reading and typography. Hosted by FH Münster, Germany. Inscript A five-day online conference showcasing presentations at the overlap of typography and technology. Kerning (discontinued) Kerning is the first international conference in Italy dedicated solely to typography and web typography. Last event was in 2019, but the organizers are keen to host future events if sponsors come forward. Leipziger Typotage The Leipziger Typotage is an annual event on type design and typography organised by the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Druckkunst Leipzig e.V. since 1995 hosted at Museum für Druckkunst Leipzig, Germany. Multilingüe Online conference on writing and typography for native languages from Latin America. Hosted by the Type Directors Club. Now24 A one-day conference (in English) held in Paris each year by TypeParis. Now23 Robothon Triennial conference on font software & technology. Hosted in-person in The Hague, Netherlands. Signs of the times A two-day hybrid conference organized by Granshan, an organization that celebrates non-Latin typefaces and typography. YouTube TypeCon Annual conference presented by S{o}TA. Hosted in-person in Portland, Oregon. TypeWknd An online-only type conference Typographics Annually in June at The Cooper Union in New York City. Typographics hosts in-person and streaming events, plus workshops, a book fair, and TypeLab, an informal, multi-day, global typographic hackathon. Events & Lectures Events that occur regularly (except Conferences), or organizations that host regular events on type design and typography. Future Fonts HyperTalks A new online event series, featuring lightning talks from designers, which may or may not be related to fonts. YouTube Letterform Archive Letterform Archive in San Francisco hosts many lectures and events, both online and in-person. St. Bride Foundation St. Bride Foundation in London hosts many lectures and events on printing, design, and typography. Type Electives Type Electives hosts lectures and events that go beyond traditional type design topics. YouTube Words of Type WoT hosts series of lectures and workshops as opportunities to learn and practice, get live feedback, and discuss with experts. Associations ATypI A global organization representing type designers and foundries. Holds an annual conference, hosted in a different country each year in September. Granshan An organization that promotes and celebrates non-Latin type design and typography. Holds an annual or biannual type design competition, followed by a conference and exhibition. SoTA “An open community dedicated to supporting and advancing the typographic arts and design education.” Organizer of TypeCon. Type Directors Club Type Directors Club is an international organization promoting typography and type design. Since 1946 they’ve hosted events, conferences, and competitions in New York City and around the world. Each year they produce Typography Annual, recognizing the year’s best typographers and type designers. Media Social media, multimedia, type news media Podcasts Creative Characters by Monotype — Bill Connolly interviews type designers and other creative characters Designed This Way conversations with designers and other creative folks, including several type designers Ohno Radio James Edmondson chats with up-and-coming and well-established type designers The Interrogang Podcast “A weekly briefing and discussion of type, design, and creativity.” by Proof&Co. The Tiny Typecast Glenn Fleishman talks with type designers, calligraphers, letterpress printers, historians, and more. RSS link The Weekly Typographic from The League of Moveable Type Type Radio the oldest and most beloved podcast for type designers – interviews at conferences from 2005–2020 Publications Design Regression An academic mini journal publishing texts that are about design for reading and reading-related research Font Review Journal Deep-dive reviews of fonts, by Bethany Heck. Footnotes A print-only periodical dedicated to type design. Type Magazine Print and online magazine on type and typography. TYPE01 News and articles from the world of type design. Online and print. Typographica Typeface reviews, articles on type design and typography. Typography papers An academic journal published by the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading and the Hyphen Press. Free PDFs available. Words of Type Encyclopedia Words of Type brings together the terms used in typography, illustrated and explained in multiple languages. Blogs Type foundry and type designer blogs, or blogs that frequently feature articles on type design. Blaze Type Blog Entrelinha Blog by Plau on everything type. In Brazilian Portuguese. Type Design Class: Resources A series of articles and tutorials by Viktor Baltus on type design. Streamers Watch a type designer! Adobe Fonts Livestreams Discussing type with Adobe’s foundry partners. akimbo.black Twitch Alanna Munro Twitch YouTube Alex Slobzheninov YouTube Blaze Type Twitch YouTube Daniel Nisbet Twitch YouTube Eli Heuer Twitch YouTube Plau live streams Live panels, font releases and typographic content in Brazilian Portuguese. SophiaTypeLove Twitch YouTube Stephen Nixon (Arrow Type) Twitch YouTube typedesign_bk Twitch Character design Latin Context of Diacritics An analysis of languages that use Latin diacritics and the frequencies of letters and letter pairs with diacritics. Diacritics resources Twitter thread by Aleksandra Samuļenkova, thread listing many resources concerning diacritics and special characters of the Latin script diacritics.typo.cz by Filip Blažek How to draw a Capital Sharp S A guide to drawing the German capital eszett (ẞ) by Ralf Herrmann. How to Draw a Proper Capital Eszett A guide to drawing the German capital eszett (ẞ) by Christian Thalmann. Microsoft Character Design Standards Guidelines and best practises for drawing the Latin alphabet, as well as figures, diacritics, punctuation and symbols. On diacritics A general introduction to the design of diacritics by David Březina The Insects Project Central European diacritics Vietnamese Typography by Donny Trương, comprehensive resource typographic features and diacritics in Vietnamese Italics & Obliques Design an Italic Typeface On-demand course by Charles Nix for LinkedIn Learning. You might be able to access LinkedIn Learning for free via your local library. Designing italics A thesis stemming from a five-year study by Victor Gaultney. Easy oblique Glyphs tutorial by Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer. Italics workflow A discussion on TypeDrawers. Maintaining Contrast and Weight across Upright and Italics A discussion on TypeDrawers. The essential italic A presentation at ATypI 2017 by Victor Gaultney. The italic design process A presentation at ATypI 2020 by Victor Gaultney. Why are italics lighter than their upright counterparts? A discussion on TypeDrawers. Cyrillic Cyrillic local forms by Maria Doreuli Cyrillic script variations and the importance of localisation by Krista Radoeva Cyrillic's links a collection of links to many online Cyrillic type samples and inspirations, by Vika and Vita Cyrillicsly workshops for learning Cyrillic type design Extending Cyrillic (and later Latin) character sets by Thomas Phinney How to design Cyrillic letters Њ (Nje), Љ (Lje), Ћ (Tshe), and Ђ (Dje) An article by Igor Petrovic on localizing your glyphs for Serbian and Macedonian Cyrillic. Some comments regarding Cyrillic glyphs a lengthy GitHub issues discussion on Cyrillic glyphs in Catharsis Fonts’ open-source typeface Cormorant The relatively easy way to find out the quality of a Cyrillic typeface by Alexandra Korolkova Greek Greek type design by Gerry Leonidas Polytonic Greek: a guide for type designers by Irene Vlachou Hebrew Some guidelines and recommendations for the design of a Hebrew book typeface MA dissertation by Adi Stern Canadian Syllabics Lava Syllabics type specimen [PDF] A well-researched and invaluable look at the process behind designing a Canadian Syllabics typeface, which includes many special features to support a wide range of local preferences for languages that use this script. Math symbols Fonts for Mathematics Math symbols for Latin 1 from Microsoft’s Character design standards Mathematical symbols contrasted or not? discussion on TypeDrawers Maths glyphs in a non-maths font? discussion on TypeDrawers Box drawing characters boxDrawing.py Script for generating box drawing characters and block elements OpenType feature programming Fonts and Layout for Global Scripts An introduction to Unicode, the OpenType font format, and OpenType feature programming, by Simon Cozens. OpenType Feature File specification Technical specification for the OpenType programming language. The OpenType Cookbook Learn to code your own OpenType features with Tal Leming. Language support Determining the true language support of a font is a complex problem that has not yet been completely solved. Most of these tools will simply report which languages a font seems to support, based solely on its character set, but some tools like Hyperglot and Shaperglot will also check OpenType features for some languages that require the use of them. CharSet Checker and CharSet Builder by Alphabet Type FontDrop Hyperglot by Rosetta Type. This is by far the most well-researched tool for checking language support. Hyperglot is available as a command line tool and a web interface. The command-line tool also checks OpenType support for some languages that require the use of OpenType features. Web interface Github repo Pyfontaine by Google Fonts Shaperglot A Python library by Simon Cozens for testing a font’s language support. It also checks the behaviour of a font’s OpenType features in order to confirm support for languages that require the use of OpenType features. Validate by Underware Wakamai Fondue Standardized character sets Adobe Latin Character Sets Google Fonts Glyph Sets Koeberlin Latin Character Sets Underware Latin Plus Latin character set by Underware that offers decent language support with a relatively small character set. Encoding borders and ornaments 'ornm' feature Microsoft OpenType spec Border Ornaments and their implementation: questions & answers. discussion on TypeDrawers Ornaments and Unicode discussion on TypeDrawers Python and coding Learn Python with DrawBot DrawBot is a free macOS app that allows you to draw graphics and typography with Python. It’s one of the best ways for a type designer or graphic designer to start learning Python. Animation tutorial screencast by Just van Rossum DrawBot: Drawing with Python by David Jonathan Ross (workshop recording) Getting Started with DrawBot tutorial by Andy Clymer Getting started with parametric design in DrawBot 3-part tutorial series by Stephen Nixon Python for Designers tutorial series by Roberto Arista Python for Visual Designers Type@Cooper course with David Jonathan Ross Python scripting in Glyphs Learn from Glyphs’ official tutorials, and from open-source scripts developed by other type designers. Glyphs 3 Python API documentation Glyphs scripts by Rainer Scheichelbauer (aka mekkablue) of the Glyphs team. This repo contains many useful tools and code examples to help you write your own scripts. There are many more repos of Glyphs scripts by type designers and developers: Alex Slobzheninov Erik Moberg Federico Parra Barrios Filipe Negrão Guido Ferreyra Henrique Beier Hugo Jourdan Jens Kutilek Jeremy Tribby Juan Pablo del Peral and Andrés Torresi Kyle Benson Luke Prowse Pedro Arilla Simon Cozens Tosche Omagari Wei Huang Yanone Python Scripting for Type Design A workshop by Peter Nowell for type designers working in Glyphs or RoboFont with little to no coding experience. Scripting Glyphs official tutorials from Glyphs Python scripting and extensions in RoboFont Learn from RoboFont’s official tutorials, and from open-source scripts developed by other type designers. Python Scripting for Type Design A workshop by Peter Nowell for type designers working in Glyphs or RoboFont with little to no coding experience. RoboFont community Discord channel RoboFont documentation RoboFont mechanic Extension manager for RoboFont RoboFont Script Database Spreadsheet by Ryan Bugden of useful extensions not in Mechanic. Git and version control Git for Type Designers by Frank Grießhammer Hinting How to hint variable fonts by Michael Duggan Kerning tools BubbleKern by Toshi Omagari Hands, Face, Space! by Simon Cozens HTLetterspacer by Huerta Tipográfica Kern On by Tim Ahrens Kern-a-lytics by Frank Grießhammer [live demo @ Robothon 2018] kerncritic by Simon Cozens MetricsMachine by Tal Leming Proofing tools Font proofing software drawBotProofing A set of scripts for generating PDF proofs from a fonts or UFOs, by Frank Grießhammer. Font Goggles by Just van Rossum, a macOS desktop font viewer for testing fonts, specifically text shaping and variation behavior. Font Proofer A commercial app for proofing fonts, by Peter Nowell. Integrates with Glyphs and RoboFont, allowing you to re-generate proofs anytime with a single click. Printer recommendations Discussions by type designers on printers they use for proofing type. Twitter threads 2023 2023 2022 2021 2017 2016 2013 TypeDrawers threads 2020 2016 2015 2013–2022 Web-based proofing and testing There are a wide range of browser-based tools that you can drop your work-in-progress font into to test it. Most of these tools process your font using a client-side library like OpenType.js, which means your font is not uploaded to any server. Axis Praxis A playground for testing variable fonts. Made by Laurence Penney. Bulletproof Font Tester by Adam Jagosz Coverslip by Simon Cozens Crowbar Dinamo Font Gauntlet A tool for proofing and animating variable fonts. FB TypeRoof Proof large design space variable fonts by animating through instance locations as keyframes on ‘stages’. Made by Font Bureau, to develop Roboto Delta and the full Amstelvar Roman and Italic avar 2 fonts, since 2023. Github source FB VideoProof Proof large design space variable fonts by animating through instance locations as keyframes. Made by Font Bureau, to develop Roboto Flex and the full Amstelvar Roman and Italic avar1 fonts, 2019-2022; deprecated by TypeRoof. Github source FontDrop by Viktor and Clemens Nübel Galvanized Jets by Samarskaya & Partners Impallari Type Font Testing Page by Pablo Impallari Github source Mirror 1 Mirror 2 Mirror 3 Mirror 4 Mirror 5 Mota Italic Font Testing Page A modified version, by Mota Italic, of Pablo Impallari’s Font Testing Page. See also the Devanagari and Hebrew versions. Samsa Variable Font Inspector by Laurence Penney Stack & Justify Stack & Justify is a tool to help create type specimens by finding words or phrases of the same width. Inspired by Mass-Driver’s Waterfall tool. TN Type Tools A set of layout tools for experimenting with variable fonts in various ways. Made by Font Bureau, when it was part of Type Network, to develop the first Decovar and Amstelvar variable fonts in 2016; deprecated by VideoProof and then TypeRoof. Github source Validate by Underware Variable Font Playground Wakamai Fondue by Roel Nieskens Waterfall A tool by Mass-Driver that generates words of equal length after you drop in a font. Great for proofing in early stages of a font, when you’re still seeing how the forms interact with each other. Proofing texts adhesiontext by Miguel Sousa Hoefler&Co Universal proofing text by Jonathan Hoefler Just Another Test Text Generator by Tim Ahrens Github source Vietnamese and Pinyin proofing text discussion on TypeDrawers Wordtips Word Finder Handy tool for finding words that contain certain letter combinations, to help you build proofing texts for kerning and ligatures. Font engineering Font engineering is the technical side of making font files that work as intended on a wide range of systems. What is font engineering? Font Engineering An overview of Alphabet Type’s font engineering workflow, including links to more resources on each topic. Font engineering and the importance of what you can't see. by Tom Rickner Font Engineering resources needed Discussion on TypeDrawers Font Engineering with Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer A course from ILT Academy that will introduce you to font engineering. Font Engineering: Defining a Profession A presentation by Rosalie Wagner for ATypI 2022 Tech Talks Fonts and Layout for Global Scripts A free book about font design, Unicode and the computer processing of complex text, by Simon Cozens. Make Your Fonts Work in… A presentation on font engineering by Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer of Glyphs, at ATypI Tech Talks 2022. Practical Font Engineering with Elí Castellanos A course from Tipastype The Raster Tragedy at Low-Resolution Revisited An essay on the problems of rendering text on-screen, with a focus on hinting. Updated several times since it was originally presented in 1997, this essay is considered required reading by many accomplished type designers. Tools for font engineering DTL OTMaster A dedicated app for font engineering that allows you to perform a wide range of proof tests, QA checks, and edits to your font files. Font engineering tools A collection of font engineering utilities by Simon Cozens Fontbakery A quality-assurance tool for fonts, developed by Google but used by many foundries. Primarily a command-line tool, a web interface was recently added. Github source Web interface FontDev A web-based tool for viewing and editing the internal tables of a binary font file. Runs entirely in your browser, without uploading your font files to any server. By Olli Meier. FontTableViewer A simple app to view and compare the OpenType tables inside of your font files. fontTools (& ttx) An indispensible toolkit for editing fonts via Python. Also includes ttx, a command line tool that quickly converts binary font files to human-readable XML, which can also be edited and converted back to binary. Microsoft Typography Docs A collection of resources for font engineering, including the OpenType specification, and various other articles and tools. VerticalMetricsTools Managing vertical metrics is one of the most common font engineering problems. This set of Python tools includes a command line tool which generates a PDF to preview the vertical metrics of a font. Type specimens Type specimens are the original marketing tool for type foundries, going back hundreds of years. Today, many type foundries still design a PDF specimen (and sometimes printed copies) for each typeface release, to complement the web specimen. See also: Web specimen tools DeliverGlyphs in InDesign by Jean loup Fusz, InDesign script to list all glyphs in a font (site in French) Specimen Builder by Mark Boulton SpecimenDropper by Alphabet Type Text Fitting in InDesign by In-Tools Type Specimens A research project by Mark Boulton about type specimens. Historic type specimens Mad, Bad (but Good to Know): A survey of type specimens offline and online by Paul Shaw Online Archive of Type Specimens by Letterform Archive Printing Types, a Digital Edition Nicholas Rougeux has lovingly put together a digital edition of the famous 1922 book Printing Types by Daniel Berkeley Updike, and the 1937 second edition. Resources on the history of type specimens Twitter thread by Hoefler&Co, a list of books Specimen Books of Metal & Wood Type A directory by Typographica of type foundry catalogs available online Naming your font Typeface name check Use this tool by Lars Schwarz to check if your font name might already be taken. WoLiBaFoNaGen WordListBasedFontNameGenerator, an app by Jens Kutilek. macOS Windows Open-source your fonts Google Fonts Used by millions of websites, it’s the world’s largest repository of high-quality open-source fonts. Google Fonts has also funded the development of many open-source fonts. Google Fonts Contribution Guide SIL Open Font License The most common open-source license used for fonts. Required if you want to add your fonts to the Google Fonts library. Open source type foundries Foundries that primarily release open-source fonts Collletttivo The League of Moveable Type The O.G. of open-source foundries Tunera Velvetyne Selling your fonts Marketplaces & distributors Adobe Fonts Anyone with an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription can use your fonts, and you get paid based on usage. Creative Market A marketplace for all types of creative assets, including fonts. Seems to be geared more toward hobbyists and freelancers rather than companies. Royalty rate 50%. Open a Shop Fontspring Formerly known as the world’s largest independent font marketplace, Fontspring is now owned by Creative Market, and has since reduced royalty rates from 70% to 50%. Foundry Signup Fontstand Font rentals distributor. 50% royalty rate. Foundry Signup I Love Typography A new distributor with a large roster of some of the best indie type foundries. Monotype Sell your fonts through MyFonts, FontShop, Linotype.com, Fonts.com, etc. Royalty rate 50%. Getting started Type Network A network that distributes for many of the world’s best type designers. YouWorkForThem Opened in 2001, it’s one of the longest-running marketplaces for fonts and stock assets. Submissions Learn about licensing 15 Things I Learned from Joyce Ketterer about EULAs by Alex John Lucas Exploring End User Licensing Agreements by Alex John Lucas Three Ways to Improve Your EULA Thomas Jockin interviews Joyce Ketterer for TypeThursday Type Right Why Addenda? ATypI presentation by Joyce Ketterer, Font Licensing Expert Why don’t EULA’ve me? ATypI presentation by Joyce Ketterer, Font Licensing Expert XYZ Type – Foundry Documents A collection of documents (EULA and business documents) from XYZ Type, provided under Creative Commons CC0 license. Criticising the status quo A rant on web font licenses Blog post by web developer Manuel Moreale. It’s a good summary of how some web developers feel about web font licenses, but far more interesting is the comments thread on HackerNews. Developers, IT, and tech people criticising font licenses Comments on HackerNews Font licensing is ill, please help heal it by Alina Sava Licenses to Heal by Frank Adebiaye Innovative licensing: pricing based on company size ABC Dinamo Mass-Driver Newlyn Production Type Innovative licensing: all-in-one licenses Desktop/web/ebook/app combined into a single license. Alanna Munro DJR Fontwerk New Glyph Swiss Typefaces probably one of the first to do this? Tiny Type Co License enforcement FontRadar Crawls the web to help you find and correct authorized and unauthorized usage of your fonts. Starting a foundry Thinking about starting a foundry, or setting up a website to support your shop? Here are some tools that might come in handy. Running a type foundry 2022 Annual Report & Almanac Statistics, facts and data from 2022 in the world of independent type foundries, by Proof&Co. Is it realistic to want to start up a type foundry? A Quora post with answers from several well-known type designers and foundry owners. Ohno Radio A podcast hosted by James Edmondson, where he chats with type designers and often discusses what it’s like to run a foundry. Starting a type foundry 101: a checklist A presentation at ATypI 2016 by Jean-Baptiste Levée. Starting Your Own Type Foundry Ulrik Hogrebe (TypeThursday) talks with Jesse Ragan and Ben Kiel about starting their new type foundry. Taking Your Fonts to Market: Foundry, Reseller, or Go Solo? by Stephen Coles for Typographica. The Autobiography of an Independent Type Foundry Presentation by James Edmondson of OHno Type Co at Adobe Max 2022. Type Foundries Today A 2013 census and report on the state of type foundries, published by Typographica. Type Foundry Survey Dinamo talks with 15 type foundry owners in 2022. Why did I start a type foundry? by Christian Schwartz Type foundry directories Type Foundries Archive (offline) Archived copy Type Foundry Directory by Matthew Smith (also available as a spreadsheet) Type Foundry Index E-commerce platforms Discussion on e-commerce platforms for type foundries TypeDrawers Fontdue Developed by Tom Conroy and currently used by many type foundries. FoundryCore Developed by Guido Ferreyra and is currently used by foundries like Blackletra Type Foundry, Blaze Type, and Undercase Type. Fountain An e-commerce plugin for Kirby CMS. Coming soon, from Nymark Type. Gumroad A large e-commerce platform for creatives to sell digital products. Used by Delve Fonts, Cinetype, Justin Penner, Nuform. Lttr Shop (discontinued) Developed by Filip Paldia and currently used by foundries like DizajnDesign and Setup Type. Appears to have been discontinued around mid-2023. Website platforms Craft CMS Used by DJR, Positype, TypeMates ProcessWire Used by Velvetyne Web specimen tools BigText by Zach Leatherman fit-to-width.js by Laurence Penney FitText by Paravel Font Face Observer by Bram Stein Font Testing Page by Pablo Impallari Font-To-Width by Nick Sherman and Chris Lewis slabText by Brian McAllister specimenTools by Lasse Fister Font tools for web development FontFreeze A JavaScript tool by Mu-Tsun Tsai for freezing OpenType features into a font file. Runs entirely in the user’s browser without uploading font files to a server. This is accomplished by running fontTools in the user’s browser via Pyodide, a Python distribution built in WebAssembly. fontkit A JavaScript library by Devon Govett for parsing fonts. Supports a wide range of font formats and OpenType features. Does not support variable fonts. lib-font A JavaScript library by Pomax for inspecting fonts. Supports a wide range of font formats. opentype (discontinued) A JavaScript library by Bram Stein for parsing fonts. OpenType.js A popular JavaScript library by Frederik De Bleser for parsing glyph outlines from font binaries. Note that it does not support the complete range of OpenType tables and formats that its name would suggest. Type testers Flont by Chris Lewis Fontsampler by Johannes Neumeier TDF Type Tester by Quinn Keaveney Type Neighbor by Jon Young Typeshow by Frank Rausch Custom foundry site design and/or development Ashler Design Clients include Sudtipos, Nova Type. Chris Lewis Clients include I Love Typography, DJR, Positype, Laura Worthington. Friends of The Web Clients include Frere-Jones Type, Kilotype Hambly Freeman Clients include CoType Foundry. Humans & Machines The complexity-loving, beautiful minds behind Dinamo’s website. Kenneth Ormandy Clients include I Love Typography, Alanna Munro. Studio Lindeman Clients include I Love Typography, A2-Type. Village One Clients include TypeMates, HvD Fonts. Business coaching Business Letters Matthew Rechs at Business Letters is a business coach and consultant to the creative and type industries. He is a former CEO of Type Network; served for several years on the board of the Unicode Consortium; and led Typekit’s integration into Creative Cloud during his many years at Adobe. Julia Hiles Julia is a business coach and consultant with substantial experience in the type business, having worked as a sales director for Monotype, and co-founding the I Love Typography e-commerce platform. See also… More lists of type design resources. Awesome Typography by Joël Galeran (an extensive list of digital font tools and technology) Font-Utilities by Roel Nieskens Mota Italic's Type Design Resources Tools for font designers Type links by Rosalie Wagner Velvetyne's Tools & Resources A list of type design resources and open-source type foundries. To contribute, post an issue or make a pull request on the Github repo, or email [enable JavaScript to view email] Type Design Resources was designed and developed by Justin Penner. Masthead set in Isenheim by Benoît Ferran. Headings set in Spline Sans Mono by Eben Sorkin and Mirko Velimirović. Text set in Sofia Sans by Lettersoup. Built in Jekyll and hosted by Github. This site does not contain trackers or cookies.enenhttps://typedesignresources.com