by Guadalupe Guevara

What are the type foundries? A type foundry is a company created and mostly under the control of a designer. Modern Type Foundries essentially started in the 1980’s. In the 1980’s the digital revolution brought on the fall of the photo and metal industry while also causing the rise of software and computer-based companies to power, examples include Apple and Adobe as mentioned in the article “The digital Wave” by a man named Robin Kinross, these large companies caused small foundries to follow made up of the likes of Emigres, the Enschede Font Foundry, and FontShop/FontFont which all performed on the desktop.

After some years there was a shift where most font types came from lone designers and small foundries promoting an independent business atmosphere. As mentioned in the extensive research by Emily King, which mainly focused on areas like London, the Netherlands, and the east and west coast of the U.S between 1987 and 1997 as focus points for innovations in technology, Emily King came to conclude that type design became “Financially insecure business.” Predicting if a typeface would be successful and sell was a challenge and continues to be. King continued to say “There is now very little investment in new type design, and for the most part it is the designers themselves that fund the development of new faces.” Individual designers had to stake their own money in hopes of designing a typeface that could catch the attention of the masses. Many underestimating just how hard it was to even make a typeface.

Which at the turn of the century in 2001 in an eye article Ms. King would later conclude. The novelty of typeface had died quickly and the realization of the difficulty of the task. How early on access and ease of experimentation died during the 90’s. A good example of this was Adobe’s attempts to catch consumers interest in print and design projects. Which came along with the resounding success of their postscript types between 1989 and 1991, which abruptly ended by the recession of 1992. Their focus shifting after a decade to developing new technology with the typeface. As larger companies receded from the front lines of typeface other foundries grew and multiplied facing challenges like piracy and still ever present larger companies who sold type in cheap bundles. Every foundry had a way of dealing with these issues. Examples given by King were foundries like Enschedéwho opted for the quality type at high prices and Dalton Maag who took to custom type. OpenType had yet to catch on within these foundries and technology advanced but at the time of the article, King speculated that innovation would possibly take place again.

 In 2009, Ms. Littlejohn asked plenty of people in the type sphere if they believed that this was a good time for type design implying that type face had become a business world wide. She noticed that the greatest change from the back than seemed to appear within type design practice rather than in the design of the letter forms themselves. Many people who were in her article praised the advancements in technology and accessibility, as well as the overall growth of the industry. However despite these exciting developments many lamented that despite these great advancements not many were experimenting with type face. Distribution also changed with these advancement while smaller type foundries struggle with smaller retail price dealing with bigger distributors it was a pick and choose fight. Either go with the bigger companies and get less but reach more or distribute yourself and get more but less reach. Due to the advancements each Font Foundry had a choice to make that benefited them the best. Type designers like Xavier Dupré rather distribute their work through other foundries than set up his own and avoided related tasks such as dealing with consumers or marketing.

Today's Font Foundries continue to grow as we continue to make advancements but it isn’t easy. It’s hard work it involves many tasks besides creating typefaces. Most foundries are a single designer or very small shops, many needing help from other foundries and distributors mainly for font production, web, and language extension work. Like any small business they have their troubles but today many are in a financially good place due to their extensive amount of choices on how they handle all the before mentioned aspects of their work.