Why a blog?

First and foremost, Fontdue is a technical solution for type foundries, operating quietly in the background. We’ve worked hard to deliver on the promise and build a platform that we ourselves want to use, and to respond proactively to what foundries are asking for.

From the start, our mission has been to empower independent type designers, and shift the typeface economy away from giant corporations.

We’ve had many conversations with our customers and colleagues over the years about what it takes to run a foundry successfully. For a while now, we’ve been thinking about how we can share what we’ve learned from these conversations, as well as from our own experiences.

This blog is an opportunity for us to touch on these subjects, with a mix of technical topics, conversations with foundries, and other formats like case studies of new foundry websites. For details about new features on the platform, the what’s new page is updated with every release.

Community

Fontdue is also part of a community. We make tools for the type community, from within this community. We are in conversation with foundries on a daily basis, and these interactions give us valuable insight into the needs of foundries since each has their own perspective.

Rather than create another design blog highlighting creative work, we want to create a place that speaks specifically to type designers, providing insight from our own and our colleagues’ experiences. The foundries building on Fontdue form a community by themselves, and we want to create new ways to strengthen it – the blog is a step in this direction.

Conversations

We’re always excited when we get to meet foundries in the real world – it’s a special experience getting to meet people in person after only interacting online. We’ve had the opportunity to travel to different places and meet many of you already. And so we had the idea that we could record these conversations, and turn them into long-form texts alongside photos we take ourselves. The first of these was a conversation with Tüpokompanii in Estonia, which we’re publishing today.

Investment

Fontdue has been a sustainable business from the start, and has been my full-time job since early 2023. It’s grown substantially since then, enabling us to invest even more into developing the platform and hiring talented creatives to work on what they enjoy doing. Jan Egbers has taken on the various roles of proofreader, writer and editor for the blog, as well as the wider site. Jules Janssen creates the illustrations and directs the visual design. Roles such as these are becoming increasingly automated nowadays, but we strongly believe they are important to be performed by humans.