As a little gift, Zrinka designed these digital wallpapers for you, using our typefaces Polymode, Study, and Plumbago. Formatted for use on your phone, tablet, or computer. ▶ Download wallpaper
Our new typeface Plumbago prioritizes graphic form over typographic convention, with organic octagonal shapes fitted to a monospaced grid. It’s a funky composition: within its rigid measured beat, each character has its own dynamic movement, with ovoid curves butting up against straight boundaries. To celebrate Plumbago’s debut at Brand New Conference, we’ve released the typeface for early access. We’ve already added two more widths and a lowercase, and we’re planning to expand the family more soon. ▶ Try & buy Plumbago
We helped HashiCorp’s internal Brand Studio consolidate and refine its typographic palette with a new custom typeface. Working with the studio and with the help of Inga Plönnigs, we brought visual interest, developer flavor, and utility to a family used for product wordmarks, the lead typographic voice on their site, and more. ▶ Read our HashiCorp case study
We’ve carried the heritage of the iconic Kellogg’s logo into a full-blown custom typeface for WK Kellogg Co. Under the guidance of their in-house team and leading critical issues firm Brunswick, we collaborated with Plau to create a proprietary typeface that draws upon the deep history of a celebrated brand. ▶ Read the entire case study
Mannered, funky, decorative, and stately: our typeface Lyric sings in a surprisingly wide range. You may have seen this one before—it has already been used beautifully for several restaurants, book designs, and packaging systems. Jesse started Lyric early in his career, and he has finally picked it up again with an eye toward finishing it. Now it’s publicly available, while still in progress. ▶ Try & buy Lyric
Designing a full custom typeface is the ultimate luxury for a brand, but sometimes a simpler solution can provide similar benefits: modifying an existing typeface to meet specific needs. In a new article on our site, we use our typeface Escalator to demonstrate how we can edit one of our fonts to match your logo, redesign individual glyphs for ownability, and more.
Happy end-of-the-year email season from Ben & Jesse
We’ve worked corporate enough to know that if you don’t spend down that design expense account by the end of the year, it will be smaller in the next year.
Make accounting happy by zeroing out that account by buying fonts. As an incentive, we’re running a 30% discount until December 31st. Just use BLOWMYBUDGET when you check out. And if you’re looking for other foundries to spend money with, you’ll find a great list at Matthew Smith’s typefoundry.directory.
We’re finally making one of our secret weapons available to you. Ben’s typeface Grep has been the cheerful body-copy voice of our company since we started. The design’s circuitous path began when a major tech company asked for a screen-oriented sans—read more about it on our site.
Although Grep is still in progress, we’re making it available for licensing now. Licensees of the current version (v0.1) will receive future updates to the family as they become available.
Hello again! We don’t usually send emails this frequently, but there’s so much to tell you about what we’ve changed for XYZ Type version 2.0! (It’s not just our website that has changed.)
We partnered with Type Network to design the new logo for Rolling Stone magazine! (Yeah, we can’t believe it either.) Check out our full case study for the new logo system, which was unveiled today.
Ben and Jesse here. Thank you for your ongoing support of our independent foundry and for joining this list. It’s been a while since we’ve sent an email, and suddenly we have a lot to tell you. We’ll be distributing some big news in four more emails over what remains of August. (We won’t be offended if you prefer to declutter your inbox and click unsubscribe.)
For Polymode Studio, the answer was Polymode Sans, a custom variable typeface family with an axis for Realness. We love talking about this project because it sheds light on the mysterious powers of variable fonts. Here are two ways to learn more!
But we have two more for you! We’re pleased to share a preview of Escalator and Elevator, two new typefaces that are almost done. Visit the minisite to see more, and contact us to purchase an advance license to these in-progress families.
Has it been a year or a decade? All we know is that 2020 was hard for everyone, and time became amorphous. Through it all, your support of our foundry has been a bright spot—topped off by Kara Gordon’s heartwarming review of Aglet Sans, which appeared on Typographica just this morning. We are feeling the feels!
Although it wasn’t the year we had planned, we did manage to get a few things done...
Since its January debut on Future Fonts, Cedar has grown from three weights to eight! The typeface’s unique angular logic yields dazzling graphic forms in the extremes, from the whittled-down Thin to the sturdy Ultra.
The typeface is still under development—italics and character set expansion are planned for future updates. Get version 0.2 now, and Future Fonts will keep you up to speed with free updates as Cedar continues to grow.
In this vibrant Risograph print, Kelli Anderson cleverly deconstructs letterforms from our new typeface Aglet Mono into five colors of overlapping ink. This frame-ready counterpart to an animation Kelli made doubles as a cheat sheet for two-letter Scrabble words.
Eminently practical and a little eccentric, Aglet Mono joins the Aglet superfamily. Like Aglet Slab and Aglet Sans, it builds on a fundamental structure of roundness, which tempers its modular, fixed-width rhythms and distinguishes it from other typefaces in the genre. ► Get to know Aglet Mono
Ben Kiel’s new typeface Ballast is here, hot on the heels of the release of Cedar. Version 0.1 of both typefaces are available exclusively from Future Fonts. Ballast’s strong but playful voice comes from a unique strategy to shift weight into balance while maintaining tight clearances. Bulky shapes pack into spaces carved out of other strokes, creating curled counterforms that provide a diversion from the monotonous rhythm of slab serifs.
Our upcoming typeface Cedar has made an early debut, exclusively on Future Fonts. Designed by Jesse Ragan, Cedar’s puzzling system wraps rudimentary vector shapes around calligraphic structures in a hand-carved aesthetic.
One of our most rewarding experiences as type designers is seeing the fonts we’ve created used well, so we love Fonts In Use, the public archive of typography. Here are just a few wonderful and unexpected examples—you can see more at fontsinuse.com.
Thank you to the graphic designers who make our work worthwhile!
Aglet Sans is the new streamlined companion to our previous release Aglet Slab, sensitively redrawn but springing from the same ethos: roundness is a disposition, not mere ornament. Narrow and straight-sided, Aglet Sans playfully exploits a system of angles and corner radiuses to arrive at a vocabulary of shapes that becomes more diverse and intriguing as it grows heavier, and feels as at home in editorial design and corporate branding as it does on the web.
Released last month, Jesse Ragan's Study is the result of a hypothetical dialogue with Rudolph Ruzicka. In a new post on our site, Jesse details the process behind bringing the design from a hand-painted alphabet to a comprehensive digital typeface family. With historical background and analysis of design decisions, the piece provides a personal look at how one typeface was made.
Our newest typeface has been waiting fifty years to be finished.
Study is based on an alphabet concept by designer and engraver Rudolph Ruzicka, first published in 1968 but never completed as a typeface. Now our own Jesse Ragan has reimagined it as a stunning 12-style family, full of unexpected twists and turns.
Great news—all of our fonts are now available on Fontstand and Adobe Typekit, for desktop use and as hosted webfonts. We’re proud to partner with our friends at these two unique font licensing platforms.
We’re proud to unveil XYZ Type, our new independent type foundry. This marks the debut of Aglet Slab and Export, two original typefaces, joined by our previous release, Cortado.
Free trial versions of every font are available on our site, so we hope you’ll download them and put them to work. We can’t wait to see where they end up.
