Font Brief lets you find the right typeface by searching for its personality traits

Graphic designer Victor Bartis and art director Christian Costea are long-time friends who met at university in Bucharest, and the founders of Font Brief, a new tool that serves up typefaces for projects via their attributes. Housed online at fontbrief.com, users can search for fonts in an intuitive and natural way, using a project’s brief as the guide: how expressive do you need a font to be? Should it be friendly or serious? Font Brief is built on eight personality scales including “organic”, “daring” and “warm”.

The platform began as a personal project for the duo, a place where they could bring together their large collections of typefaces to aid them when working on graphic design projects. Like many, the pair had accumulated a series of links to foundries, specific typefaces and articles: “The most expressive fonts are not found on big directories, but in small places on the internet, niche places,” Bartis and Costea remark. The problem was, when working a new brief, they’d end up spending hours digging through them. So they wanted a place to succinctly organise their collections and, importantly, make them searchable.

The idea, therefore, is that Font Brief allows you to use a brief to find the right typeface by searching for terms related to the personality of the brand you are working with. “We know how to describe our brands," they add, "so why not do the same thing with fonts?”

It took just over a year to eventually bring the project to life and they describe the recently launched venture as “a one-of-a-kind font discovery platform”. There are over 300 fonts in the library, “curated, hand-picked, and classified” by Bartis and Costea and the plan is to continually expand with several hundred more already in the pipeline. These will always be the newest fonts, they continue, “from the fringes of the type world”, as well as some “less known classics”.

Ultimately, it’s a platform created with designers in mind and “with the belief that it can be of great help to anyone working on branding or editorial projects”.