A bold frontier: designers leading the indie type revolution

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Often when behemoth corporations take over an industry, there will be a surge of small, independent start-ups that flourish in its shadow. Take publishing, for example. One publishing house soaks up seemingly all the medium publishers, but in its wake comes a flurry of micro publishers. The same goes for breweries, or supermarkets. Perhaps it’s the personal touch customers crave, or the entrepreneur’s frustration with the barricaded walls of a huge company with monopoly, or a flood of money into an industry, which provokes innovation. The same is currently happening within typography. While big foundries such as Colophon and Dalton Maag are going strong, historic mega-foundry Monotype continues to grow at an incredible rate –it has recently acquired Hoefler&Co and Fontsmith since being bought for $825m back in 2019. This seems to be symbolic of an overall swell in interest and investment in typographic design internationally. At the other end of the scale, a flurry of emerging design studios and designers are launching their own type foundries in a bid to offer the creative community fresh alternatives.

To find out more, we spoke to small, independent, and ambitious designers and foundries birthed from dissatisfaction, a lack of choice, and a desire for more diversity, about their journeys, and their vision for the future. We also asked them each to suggest other foundries doing exciting work in the field – as a handy reference guide for top independent type designers around the world.

INT: Tell us about the work you do around type?

KK: There is a lot of discussion in Ukraine about the issue of national identity in design, but this is especially acute in type design. Over the past few years, Ukrainian fonts have been growing and they have their own identity. I enjoy studying historical heritage, paying attention to vernacular typography, and finding clues. It can even be one letter, which will form the basis of the future font and set its character. But at the same time, I do not like literal adherence to historical patterns, because it is easy to go into archaism. I like to look for roots in the historical, but rethink in a modern context and bring my personality. I would like to see more relevant Cyrillic and modern Ukrainian fonts appear.

INT: Tell us about the work you do around type?

SL: I founded huruf and run hrftype. Huruf is a type collective that strives to encourage greater awareness and inspire interest in typography and type design in Malaysia. We organise type workshops, events, and research dedicated to exploring typography and type design specific to Malaysian cultures. We look into topics like multilingualism and vernacular typography. We recently launched an initiative called Gotong-Royong Huruf, a type design marathon that brought together the Malaysian type community to create a local-inspired typeface built in the spirit of Gotong-Royong (which means “mutual care” in Malay).

Besides that, I also run a multilingual type design studio based in Kuala Lumpur – hrftype. Our work encompasses typeface design, lettering, multilingual matchmaking, font production, and more. We've soft launched the first retail typeface – Kedai-Kedai, and are currently working towards more retail typefaces and products that feature Malaysian type. One of our first custom-type projects is Grab Community for Southeast Asia's leading superapp.