🏆 The Best New Type Foundries of 2018
A selection of fresh new foundries worth adding to your list!
Letterform lovers, rejoice! It’s only November, and this year has already seen the apparition of several new foundries created by incredibly talented type designers from all around the world.
While we already covered their respective launch in our newsletter, Fresh Fonts, we wanted to share with you the list of our favourite foundries founded in 2018. All of them are making high-quality, unique typefaces that will definitely add character to your print and web projects. Make your designer friends jealous and your clients happy — give these a try!
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🇫🇷 General Type Studio
General Type is the impressive new foundry of Stéphane Elbaz, a French designer gone New York City, whose work you might have already seen on Typofonderie (or in case you’ve read it recently, on the French Constitution, as it is now set in Stéphane’s PS Fournier). On the foundry’s website, three of his most recent typefaces are available to try and buy: Pilat, Cambon and Mier.
🇺🇸 Etcetera Type Co.
New York-based designer Tyler Finck just launched his very own foundry last week, after self-releasing dozens of fonts and various commissioned type designs over the past six years. On his new website, you’ll discover Anybody, a brand new, massive family of 72 fonts spanning four different widths, and the latest version of Grandstander. Both of them are available as variable fonts.
🇨🇿 Florian Karsten
Based out of Brno in Czech Republic, Florian Karsten launched his own independent foundry, on which you’ll find the FK Grotesk family, freshly released after four years in the making. The typeface also comes with an additional monospace style, and a display family, making it suitable for a wide range of uses. Furthermore, I invite you to have a look at Space Grotesk, his free, pretty sleek open source sans serif.
🇩🇪 Forgotten Shapes
Based in Leipzig, Germany, Forgotten Shapes publishes digital reconstructions of lost and forgotten typefaces. The foundry is also committed to reviving these typefaces in a form as faithful to the original as possible, despite the amount of research involved. You can currently find three typefaces on the foundry’s website, whose designs all originate between 1821–1967.
🇵🇹 Nova Type Foundry
Launched at the beginning of the year, Nova Type is the foundry of the very talented Portuguese designer Joana Correia. On her foundry, you’ll find her most recent work, including Laca, a semi-sans serif inspired by retro Portuguese soap packagings, Artigo, a fantastic old style inspired text typeface, and Artigo Display, its TDC award-winning companion.
🇬🇧 Frostype
Frostype is the new independent type practice of Studio H, or Harrison Marshall pour les intimes. Named after Colin Frost, who was a letterpress compositor in the 1960s, the young foundry already published two retail typefaces: Polar, a geometric sans family with “neutral and expressive characters for dynamic contrast”, and Switch, its own take on the grotesque genre.
View the typefaces of Frostype →
✌️ Frostype is cooking up new typefaces, including monospaced Modular. Don’t miss its release, sign up here to get it in your inbox.
🇫🇷 Pizza Typefaces
Pizza Typefaces is the love child of Paris-based art directors Adrien Midzic and Luc Borho. On the website of their new foundry, four typefaces are available, including Metal, a variable font boasting nine different widths. They guys are also raising funds on Kickstarter to publish Orelo, a delightful superfamily of 120 styles ranging from Condensed Hairline to Wide Heavy, with their italics and a special Text version. All of them available as variable fonts, of course.
🇪🇸 Bruta Types
Bruta Types is the new foundry of Barcelona-based designer Estela Ibarz, and the second female-founded foundry in this list! Her first release, Trash, is a typeface with extreme stroke contrast and a great deal of personality. On the website of her new foundry, you can also have a glimpse at her two upcoming unreleased typefaces, Ockham and Monor.
View the typefaces of Bruta Types →
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🇫🇷 Extrabrut Shop
Bureau Brut created extrabrut.shop, a platform on which the French design studio shares (and sells) its typographical creations. Okay, I’m cheating a little bit — Extrabrut Shop was actually launched at the end of 2017, but still, I couldn’t resist adding it to this list. Five typefaces are currently available to try and buy on their website, including Bourrasque, the studio’s latest release.
🇺🇸 Narrators Studio
Launched in March, Narrators is the side hustle of Josh Warner, a product designer based in Redding, California. At the moment, his catalogue includes three display typefaces: Ultra, an expanded geometric font, Gothic, a sharp font that can be combined with an outline or cutout version to give it ‘a neon glow vibe’ and Carta, an ultra-thin serif perfect to evoke feelings of elegance.
🇮🇳 Archetype Foundry
Fresh work from India, Archetype is the new foundry of Bangalore-based designer Sujan Sundareswaran. His first release, Dita Grotesk, is a monospace font available in two weights, and perfect for use in programming and small body text. What’s even more impressive is that he designed the typeface and launched the foundry in under three weeks. Read the full story.
🇦🇺 Foster Type
Foster Type is the new foundry of Dave Foster, an independent designer based in Sydney. His first retail release, Blanco, is a serif designed for comfortable, extended reading at smaller text sizes. Interestingly, the typeface was named after fellow type designer Noe Blanco, as it was inspired by a brief that she gave him while he was studying at TypeMedia.
🇩🇪 Kilotype
Kilotype was founded by Sebastian Losch and William Montrose, two designers who graduated from the MA Typeface Design at University of Reading. At the moment, the foundry counts two typefaces in its library: Frequenz, a typeface with a nonconformist rhythm inspired by sound waves, and Sequenz, another sans featuring even more accentuated letterforms.
View the typefaces of Kilotype →
Thanks for reading! 👋🏽
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