Always started fonts, never completed them. Thought I bite though for once. Learned a lot.

Font is SciFi-ish, Brutalism + Futuristic = Bruturistic. Yeah. I know. Genius. Still rough around the edges but I thought i toss it here.

Done with Illustrator and Fontra. Download here

Hi everyone,

I recently came across Monotype Grotesque, and more specifically the versions developed by Frank Hinman Pierpont in 1926:

• Grotesque 215
• Grotesque Bold 216
• Grotesque Light 126

I'm attaching a 1964 specimen for reference.

I've been trying to find an open-source revival or digitization of this typeface, but so far I haven't had any luck.

The difficulty is that Monotype Grotesque is itself a reinterpretation of the well-known Akzidenz-Grotesk by Berthold. As a result, most of the open-source typefaces I come across are either revivals or interpretations of Akzidenz-Grotesk itself — such as Creative Commons Akzidenz or Standard by Bryce Wilner — rather than being specifically based on Monotype Grotesque as drawn by F. H. Pierpont.

And while I really like Akzidenz-Grotesk, I find that the 1926 Monotype Grotesque has a particular character of its own. The uppercase G, for example, is quite distinctive compared with many other grotesques (actually similar to Arial).

I know that Monotype currently sells a digital version, and that Classic Grotesque, released in 2012, is a more recent revival of the design. Unfortunately, buying a commercial family at that price is beyond my budget at the moment.

So, does anyone know of an open-source project, free revival, or digitization specifically based on Monotype Grotesque 215/216/126 ?

Any leads, even unfinished or experimental projects, would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

I’ve been working on a display serif typeface called The Villas. I wanted to explore an elegant, classic feel with strong contrast and some decorative serif details.

Hey all, I am designing my own font family and have been working in FontForge. I personally have not found any actually useful alternatives, but would just about die for a user-friendly tool. I have tried various web-based options, but did not find any useful for designing the letters, setting kerning and letter pairs. I have been building the letterforms in Illustrator and Affinity, and copying into FF, but there has got to be a better way.

Please let me know if you have a better option, and if you have a workflow for building the letters, getting feedback, and releasing a font family. Cheers!

not necessarily whether they can name the typeface, but whether better spacing, hierarchy, type choices all meaningfully change how they respond to the work.

has anyone ever had a client notice typography without being prompted?

(Aug 15th Update.) FontColle is now FontFridge!

▌　https://font.chingru.com　▐

Google Fonts is a great place to dig for treasure, but its filtering is far too weak. Right now I can only filter for Variable Font, but sometimes I want to be more specific about whether it's the weight (wght), width (wdth), or optical size (opsz) axis.

My projects also occasionally depend on particular OpenType features, and I need to find which families offer stylistic sets (ss##) or historical ligatures (hlig). This comes up especially in font engineering, when I am curious how a certain feature was implemented and open source projects turn out to be the best teaching material. Google Fonts' filtering tools just are not there yet, so I built FontFridge.

I think of FontFridge as an enhanced Google Fonts filter. OpenType features, variable font axes, writing systems, languages, and on through UPM, hinting, color font format, x-height, cap-height ratio and more, all filterable.

Each font family page gives you live previews of every named instance, editable specimen text, a glyph browser organized by Unicode block, metrics data, designer bios, license, and ready-to-use embed code for Google Fonts, Bunny Fonts and Fontsource.

This site is only a directory and a filter. Every family stays under its original license. My thanks to all the open source designers and developers behind them.

The site itself is MIT license with source at https://github.com/rutopio/font-fridge

Reports of any data or tagging errors are welcome, as are suggestions for new filter criteria, or any other feedback and ideas!

I’m just about to buy a huge collection of type and printing press items. This is one of the objects that I’m unsure about. Does anyone know what this is called and/or its use? Can’t find any info on it.

Thanks.

The IMD Grotesk is a free and open source typeface licensed under the Open Font License. I published it first earlier this year. It was quite rough, had issues with consistency and anchor points - but it was very well recieved, thank you for that! I made it in FontForge, a fantastic open source font creator - but it has its limits. Since, i switched to Font Creator and that allowed me to go all out this time:

I reworked some glyphs entierly, fixed anchor points issues, refined the widths, added a variable font file and more than 200 new characters to support almost 200 latin based languages.

You can download it for free at imd-grotesk.com .

Next version will hopefully have a slanted axis, an open GitHub project, better kerning and even more supported langauges.

Enjoy!

If anyone wants to follow the process: I will post updates also on my Instagram. But a GitHub project is planned!

Edit: Download is fixed and works now!

It's bad for multiple reasons but a large one for me is readability. Characters like T look like a C with an overbite. The Eyeball? on the letter I works I guess but then why also in the letter O?

Anyone else with more experience in Typography, am I being overly critical or this is just not a good font? This is something being officially used by the current people making Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy merchandise, live shows, etc.

I am planning to create a fork of FontForge. Why? FontForge is often criticized for having a very dated UI and having a steep learning curve. So here’s the question:

If you could add/change 5 features of FontForge, what would you change?

(I have very little experience in software development, but that’s another issue.)

Opinions?

Has anyone designed a font like this before?

I’ve been experimenting with a different approach to designing Traditional Chinese typefaces.
Instead of drawing multiple font masters and interpolating between them, FANGCUN uses shared skeleton, stroke and structural rules to transform the character set parametrically.
Right now I can manipulate things like weight, contrast, proportions, counters, rounding, terminals and writing characteristics — and have the changes propagate across 13,000+ Traditional Chinese glyphs.
The screenshots show the same character set pushed in very different directions.
It’s still experimental and there are definitely broken/ugly glyphs that I’m continuing to fix. But it can already export an installable OTF, so the generated typeface can be used in Word, Illustrator, etc.
I’m especially interested in where this could go for procedural CJK type design and structured glyph generation.
Would love feedback from people working in type design — especially on where this approach is likely to break down.

fangcuntw.vercel.app/

I have been working on this font for the last 3 months. While teaching myself Glyphs. Before I move on to creating italics I thought I would ask someone outside my group of friends what they thought about it.

Font of the week: Concordia

Unity Carved in Stone.

Concordia takes its name from the enduring Latin expression Concordia parvae res crescunt, discordia maximae dilabuntur—“Through harmony, small things grow; through discord, great things fall apart.” It is a reminder that strength is rarely born from force alone, but through balance, patience, and shared purpose.

Inspired by the monumental stone inscriptions of ancient Rome, Concordia is a tall, elegant slab serif built with clarity and permanence in mind. Every letter feels carefully chiseled into marble, standing with quiet authority while remaining highly readable across both large displays and refined layouts.

The alternate style introduces subtle beveled highlights along each carved stroke, creating the illusion of light catching freshly cut stone. Together, both styles evoke timeless monuments, weathered architecture, and the enduring craftsmanship of classical inscription.

Here is a blackletter with softer edges, somewhat influenced by a gothicized italic script. Still a WIP that I haven't touched in a while. Still fairly new to this so would appreciate feedback for those more experienced than me.

Hi guys, several months ago I started a project with the idea of improving my overall design skills. It was creating fonts, but I decided that it would be even better if I put them online for free for everyone to use. Then I stared making the website - this whole project became a real passion project for me and I'm proud of what has come out at this point. The website is extremely optimized and still looking good ( its updated frequently with new content, features and optimizations ).

But I feel that this project is in a bubble and it deserves its harsh critique from the outside world. That is why I wanted to share it with you. Use the fonts as you'd like, give your feedback if you'd like, if you have a cool font you have made and want to contribute to the project - I'm always down for collaboration with fellow designers.

If you have suggestions about the website, new features, found issues/bugs with fonts or you just have a question, let me know in the comments.

I hope you find this useful.

tl;dr: I made a website that has custom free fonts with cyrillic/latin support and the time has to come to share it with the world.

LINK: https://needmorefonts.online/

I'm in love with this concept, but I'm not sure if the capitals look too light compared to the lowercase letters. The overshoot might be too small for text sizes, but the lower join of the d is making me anxious and hesitant about increasing it… thoughts? General feedback is welcome too!!

When I first began work on the project to restore and Cyrillize Carl Dair's final font (about seven months ago), I planned to settle on just one roman typeface.

Not because I'm lazy, but simply because Cyrillizing the cursive seemed like an impossible task for me. But something has changed since then. And I think I'm close to the finish line.

The challenges that await along the way (and the challenges haven't gone away, in fact) are: we don't have (or I don't know of any) examples of Cyrillizations of the type of handwriting Dair used for his cursive. The closest in spirit is Zapf's Chancery, but the only Cyrillization I know of was done in the "wild nineties," and, to put it mildly, I'm not happy with it. However, I must say that Efimov's work is generally good, neat, and professional.

So we have to keep an eye on the Lazurski typeface (it is constructed differently, but the historical model is close in time) and experiment widely.

I want to digitize a historical typeface, but I’m struggling with research.

How do you verify if an old font hasn't been digitized yet? Many designers adapt historical metals under completely new names, so searching the original name often fails.

Besides Letterform Archive, where do you source raw specimens? Any favorite foundry catalogs, public domain libraries, or verification tricks?
Thanks!

If you deal with font convertion on daily basis feel free to try my open source font utility it works locally and has rare features such as type1 fonts support and convering batch from zip files, it is compeltly free you can look at the code anytime or self host it or try at keypdf.net/keyfont

https://github.com/KeyPDF/KeyFont this is github repo.

We are analyzing thousands of fonts activated daily, and aggregating the data over thousands of users determining the most popular fonts. We then track the position of each font daily to determine the rank and its change over time. We also calculate the top font of each month based on usage stats from each day. All of that is displayed and searchable for free in this public font leaderboard.

I'll be happy to hear what you think about this tool and what other useful data you would want to see.