Elizabeth Goodspeed on why design studios are making fonts

There’s a certain point in every brand designer’s life when the siren song of type design becomes too hard to ignore. It usually hits after a few too many late nights obsessing over a custom logo, followed by the inevitable question: how hard could a full alphabet really be? A little under a decade ago, I leapt on this very thought by enrolling in the condensed Type@Cooper program – 162 in-class hours packed into 12.5-hour days, four days a week, for five weeks – where I spent hours, nay, days, agonising over the bowl of a lowercase ‘O’. It didn’t take me long to realise I wasn’t built for type design (see my fairly tragic typeface Vamp, below, as proof). Sure, I wanted to have more control over my letterforms, but I definitely didn’t want to spend the rest of my life adjusting kerning pairs in the process.

As typography takes on a larger role in branding, many studios are navigating a similar realisation. They aren’t trying to become full-time type foundries exactly, but they are seeking more dominion over their typography. Increasingly, designers don’t just want to choose typefaces. They want to make their own. Big type, weird type, emotional type – they want it all.

To contemporary brand builders, typography has become one of the most defining aspects of what makes a brand feel like a brand. It’s the connective tissue that unites campaigns, products, and digital touchpoints – one of the few visual constants in an era of sprawling, global identities. That wasn’t always the case. For most of the 20th century, branding treated typography as background, not backbone.

In the postwar decades, modernist identity design favoured restraint. Helvetica, Univers, and other neutral workhorses projected corporate universality over emotional specificity. Typography’s job was to organise information, not express it. The late 1960s and 1970s introduced a wave of expressive lettering – think of Herb Lubalin Associates’ work for brands like L’eggs – but that flair usually stayed confined to wordmarks or headlines. Visual identity systems still defaulted to pragmatic faces that could scale across materials and subsidiaries. By the 1980s, the palette narrowed again: Garamond Condensed, Bodoni, and other elegant standbys dominated fashion and publishing, while corporate design retreated to austere sans-serifs. But distinctiveness came more from what the text was saying — like Apple’s “Think Different” or New Balance’s “Runners Aren’t Normal” — than from the letterforms themselves. Typography was either expressive or systematic, but usually not both.

Today, type is expected to do everything – carry tone, emotion, and authorship, all while working across billboards, packaging, and app icons. In the busy, UI-dominated spaces of social media, strong letterforms and distinctive shapes help brands cut through the noise. Unlike a photograph or illustration (too specific to simplify) or a colour (too generic to own), typography can do a bit of everything: bold enough to command attention, flexible enough to shrink down small without losing legibility. And it holds one unbeatable advantage over any other brand asset – it literally spells the brand’s name!

The benefit of bold type is particularly pronounced for brands who don’t have a tangible product to sell, like SaaS companies or AI and fintech startups whose offering exists purely in code, service, or experience. In the absence of product photography to rely on, these brands’ typographic systems end up carrying a heavier share of the identity. Creative studio Koto’s identity for Faculty, a London-based applied AI company, is a clear example: its branding relies almost entirely on a custom typeface (Faculty Glyphic, an Albertus-inspired serif) which, alongside a handful of repeating compositional structures and a distinctive gradient, is used to set phrases describing the organisation’s focus and mission. Design studio Order, who also maintain Order Type Foundry (aka OTF – a pun on the common font file format, har har), has enacted similar approaches for its clients. Co-founder Jesse Reed explains that many of the brands Order works with are information-driven organisations selling ideas, not images. For the studio, typography functions as core infrastructure, “a device and a tool that helps them to do their jobs properly”.

Once typography became infrastructure, the logic of making your own followed naturally. If typography shapes how a brand moves, speaks, and adapts across platforms, why settle for something off the shelf? Hundreds of brands might share the same grotesk, geometric sans, or quirky serif, but a custom typeface lets a brand sound like itself. Custom type can also solve problems that licensable fonts rarely address: accommodating multiple writing systems, including special product-specific glyphs, or optimising for unusual display formats.

The origin of custom type is often creative rather than technical – a need for letterforms that echo a brand’s physical environment, emotional tone, or specific ethos. Brooklyn design studio R&M’s work for Banker’s Anchor, a public plaza in Greenpoint, exemplifies how helpful tailored type can be as connective tissue between form and idea. For the project, the studio developed Triad, a typeface whose triangular counterforms and crossed contours referenced the plaza’s real world triangular footprint – a peculiar geometry no pre-existing typeface could have contained. Co-founder Ryan Bugden says that “custom type as a differentiator for our clients is essentially a given – it usually becomes the glue that binds the whole identity together.” At other studios, emotional resonance is just as important as technical specificity. &Walsh’s Type of Feeling, the studio’s new retail type foundry, was founded with the goal of creating fonts that “evoke a specific emotional response”. In a chaotic visual landscape, brands have milliseconds to signal tone. As a primary container for meaning, typography inevitably carries an enormous share of that emotional load.

The economic logic is equally persuasive. Over the past decade, companies like Monotype have pushed subscription-based licensing, which ties font fees to shifting metrics like web traffic or app use. This takes the pay-for-play model once reserved for web fonts and applies it to desktop use – the license needed for logos and other core brand assets, and one traditionally covered by a single, one-time fee. With these systems, brands no longer own their fonts outright; instead, they pay indefinitely for continued access. Monotype’s Standard plan, for instance, costs $20,500 per year for five users. It includes access to five commercial fonts (though any variable font counts as five) and caps usage at 20 million page views and 10 million digital ad impressions. The cheaper plan, $2,500 per year, offers three typefaces and limits monthly page views to 1.5 million. By comparison, a one-time commercial license from an independent foundry like Dinamo – say, a single cut of Marfa for a company of 5,000 employees – includes desktop, app, web, social media, video, and logo use, plus third-party sharing rights, for roughly $10,500. A steep price, but once it’s paid, it’s done.

Dylan Young, senior type designer at Koto, recalls “some really troubling stories around subscription licenses recently having a huge effect on small businesses who don’t have the income to shell out thousands of dollars for license fees”. With licensing growing more expensive and labyrinthine, commissioning a custom typeface offers stability and, as Jessica Walsh of Type of Feeling notes, “full exclusivity for a fraction of the cost”. Meanwhile, more affordable software like Glyphs (€299 in 2025 compared to the €450 I paid for Robofont in 2017) has made creating custom type infinitely more accessible. Many studios can now prototype fonts in-house, and are able to bake the costs of type development into branding work from the start. What once demanded an outside expert (and a separate budget line) has become something more studios can handle themselves.

By my count, almost two dozen studios are now dabbling in typefaces alongside client work. Beyond Order’s OTF, &Walsh’s Type of Feeling, and Koto’s in-house type designer Dylan Young, the incomplete, non-exhaustive list also includes other players like Parker, Outline, Center, Andrea Trabucco-Campos’s team at Pentagram, Gretel, The Working Assembly, Studio HanLi, and Land. Some, like Order, sell to other designers. Order’s Jesse Reed says that selling fonts felt like a natural extension of its existing position as a studio (and as publishers of design books – another one of its side-businesses, called Standards Manual). “We were already designing custom fonts for brand identities. It just made sense to start releasing them more publicly.” Others, like Koto, develop custom fonts purely for clients.

Still, studio-led type isn’t without its growing pains. Working on client timelines often means producing fonts faster than traditional foundries do. Independent type designer Flavia Zimbardi notes that “very few studios fully understand what goes into making a good typeface, especially how long and costly the process is.” The pressure of speed in studio environments can allow for quicker experimentation, but it also encourages treating typefaces like one-off deliverables rather than long-term tools. Unlike a logo or a marketing campaign, a typeface isn’t built to be ephemeral; it has to hold up across thousands of uses, applications, and contexts. Kris Sowersby of Klim Type feels that many brands now treat typography like a “seasonal asset” – something to be refreshed as trends shift, rather than invested in as lasting infrastructure.

Speed also feeds a kind of conceptual shallowness. With so many studios drawing type, the market has been flooded with fonts that solve narrow visual problems but can’t stand up to long-term use. Too often, new brand fonts cling to a single gimmick while leaving the structure of the letters untouched. YouTube Sans, for instance, chops its terminals into the angle of a ‘Play’ button, but under the surface, it remains a fairly generic sans. Kris Sowersby calls these fonts “disposable”, built around one thin idea that collapses under pressure. Contrast that with R&M’s Triad, the typeface made for Banker’s Anchor, where the triangular motif reshapes the skeleton of the letterforms themselves. Ryan Bugden suggests that “it’s worth making a custom typeface if you can echo or complement the brand’s visual system in a way that doesn’t feel underdeveloped. However, visual devices employed for graphic design usually don’t translate to typography directly.”

Some studio-made fonts are clearly undercooked, plagued by rough kerning, limited language support, and amateurish point placement. But even more polished efforts often fall into a different trap: redundancy. They mimic familiar models like ITC Garamond Condensed without the refinement of a true revival or the inventiveness of a meaningful reinterpretation. Sometimes these fonts are made to avoid licensing fees; other times, they’re drawn simply to claim authorship or impress future clients in a case study. Either way, what’s left is a slightly worse version of something that already exists. Flavia Zimbardi points out that semi-custom work – where a type designer carefully modifies one of their own typefaces – can be a smarter, more durable solution than rushing to build something from scratch. “It would certainly be more beneficial to the client,” she says, “but I guess it’s harder to claim ‘bragging rights’ on creating something ‘bespoke’ that way.” Of course, smart customisation requires deep familiarity with the type landscape, what typefaces already exist, and how to build on them thoughtfully. That kind of typographic literacy can be missing at the studios who leap straight to making something new.

For all the technical and conceptual flaws that studio-made type sometimes invites, the shift has its upsides. Historically, type design has been a tough field to break into, dominated by a small, mostly white, male, and Western group of specialists, many of whom only landed jobs through costly postgraduate programs or long apprenticeships. Widening access to type tools, education, and distribution has opened the door to a larger cross-section of designers, bringing in new cultural references, priorities, and aesthetics. Scrappiness in type, after all, is nothing new. Many of the designers now seen as canonical started informally themselves – fueled only by a Robofont trial and a love of letterforms. Thierry Blancpain of Grilli Type recalls that when it launched, “we released single weight typefaces that had tons of mistakes in them and were naïve beyond most releases you see today. We were noobs, and we celebrated it.” More people making type means more ideas, more risk-taking, and more stylistic invention. As Type of Feeling puts it: “If it makes you feel something, it’s worth making.” Not every new font needs to be a technical masterpiece from the jump to add something meaningful to the landscape.

It’s possible that the growth of studio-led type design has also made it easier, and safer, for more people to enter the field. Making a living as a full-time type designer has always been precarious. Fonts can take months or years to finish, offer no guaranteed income while in development, and only start generating revenue when, and if, they sell. By treating type as one part of a broader studio practice, many designers – especially those from underrepresented backgrounds – can now develop their skills without having to gamble their entire livelihood on retail font sales. Dylan Young, who is self-taught and has primarily worked in branding environments, described the benefits of this path: “I still have lots to learn, and working alongside freelance type partners and foundries teaches me new things all the time – things I might have learnt if I’d had the formal education – but I think the path I’ve gone down has worked really well for me, and I’d encourage others not to see education as a blocker to pursuing a career in type.”

Dylan’s path shows that formal education isn’t the only way into type design, so long as real mentorship is part of the picture. But that kind of access is rare. Many, if not most, designers inside branding studios start drawing type on their own, and continue working in isolation as their skills develop. Historically, younger designers learned inside type foundries, where experienced peers offered not just feedback on curves and spacing, but guidance on production standards, licensing, and professional sustainability. That structure has largely eroded. Studio-led projects may offer informal exposure, but rarely provide the kind of rigorous, long-term critique that once defined the apprenticeship model. Flavia Zimbardi feels “we’re seeing expansion of advanced education and type tools getting crazy good, but a lot is missing in the mentorship and critical feedback avenue.” When that internal loop is missing, early or underdeveloped ideas too easily get mistaken for finished fonts. Or, as Kris Sowersby more bluntly framed it: “The only feedback people get now is Instagram likes.”

In-house type design isn’t inherently a problem. But if every studio brings it inside, what happens to the rest of the field? Custom lettering, semi-custom wordmarks, and brand fonts once provided steady, diversified work for independent type designers. Now, more of that revenue is staying within studios, where type is often drawn by interns or generalists without deep training. In effect, studio foundries are cutting out the middleman. The model works, for now, but only because it still leans on a larger type ecosystem: tools, standards, and invisible labour built by full-time professionals. But that ecosystem is getting harder to sustain. If fewer people can make a living as type designers, the infrastructure that supports good type begins to dissolve. More people making type isn’t the issue. Fewer people being paid to do it full-time is.

I didn’t last long as a type designer. But two lessons from Type@Cooper stuck with me: making a typeface is easy; making a good typeface is not. Type design isn’t a magic bullet. It’s a slow, stubborn craft that resists shortcuts, and rewards the designers willing to take the long road. (And, of course: always, always put your bézier points on the apex of your curves!)