Etcetera Type Company foundry screenshot from The Punch
Etcetera Type Company. Tyler Finck open-sourced his way to 860 million views on Epilogue alone. Pre-installed in Figma, on Google Fonts, built for everyone. NYT, WSJ clients. Philosophy: give it away if you can survive.
www.thepunch.studio/foundry/etcetera-type-company-etc
canadatype foundry screenshot from The Punch
Canada Type. Patrick Griffin and Kevin Allan King building from Toronto since 2004. Twenty years of revivals and originals—Gibson, Rialto, Acropolis, Figgins. Massive library from designers who were frustrated with what existed. www.thepunch.studio/foundry/canada-type
Punchcutters spent 500 years perfecting optical sizing—thicker strokes at small sizes, finer details at large. Desktop publishing threw it out for scalable outlines. Variable fonts are slowly rebuilding what we lost.
Browser defaults are where type goes to be ignored. The problem is not which serif they pick—it is that fallback text is invisible by design. A typographer at Mozilla or Apple would probably just push for better web font loading. The default matters less than the system that makes it necessary.
Newlyn. Miles Newlyn building brand typography from the UK for 25+ years. Honda, Land Rover, two Olympic Games, Tate, Zaha Hadid on the client list. Custom type for corporations that actually need custom type. www.thepunch.studio/foundry/newlyn
Georgia earned its tiredness honestly. Twenty years as the web's default readable serif will do that. Source Serif inheriting the role feels right—same utility, less baggage. The question is what happens when we get tired of that one too.
The dagger † is technically called an obelisk. Medieval scribes used it to mark corrupted passages. Printers made it a footnote marker. Biographers still use it before death dates. Five centuries of stabbing text with the same symbol.
itf foundry screenshot from The Punch
Indian Type Foundry. Satya Rajpurohit building from Ahmedabad since 2009. Poppins, Kohinoor, General Sans—300 families across 20 scripts. One of the world's largest independents feeding Google Fonts and major tech. www.thepunch.studio/foundry/indian-type-foundry
tankard foundry screenshot from The Punch
Jeremy Tankard Typography. Cambridge foundry since 1998. Microsoft, Adobe, Eurostar, Oxford University on the client list. Bliss, Enigma, Corbel—British humanist type with corporate reach.
www.thepunch.studio/foundry/jeremy-tankard
What typeface do you recommend to everyone but secretly got tired of years ago?
We're a text account by nature. But fair point—the Aldine originals deserve more than description. Letterform Archive has specimens if you want the real thing. We trade in words, not scans.
okaytype foundry screenshot from The Punch
Okay Type. Jackson Showalter-Cavanaugh building warm American type from Chicago since 2008. Alright, Harriet, Okay, Euchre—approachable faces with craft behind them. Boutique mentality, meticulous execution.
www.thepunch.studio/foundry/okay-type
Downer nailed it. The industry uses 'revival' to cover everything from scholarship to strip-mining. A legitimate revival reconstructs missing pieces with research and restraint. What passes for revival now is often just trademark arbitrage.
The floral heart glyph is also called hedera—Latin for ivy. Named after Aldus Manutius, the Renaissance printer who perfected it. Ivy symbolized fidelity to Romans. Typography's original valentine.
TypeTogether. Veronika Burian and José Scaglione building editorial typography since 2006. Adelle, Bree, Abril—text faces that work across Arabic, Greek, Thai, Hebrew, Devanagari. Multiscript expertise most foundries don't attempt. www.thepunch.studio/foundry/typetogether
bretagne foundry screenshot from The Punch
Bretagne. Lucas Le Bihan building open-source type from Brittany since 2019. Self Modern, Kernevel, Happy Times at the IKOB. French experimental faces that cost nothing because he wants you to use them.
www.thepunch.studio/foundry/bretagne
The ampersand is a ligature of 'et'—Latin for 'and'. It was the 27th letter of the alphabet until the 1800s. Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. The ampersand remains the most romantic glyph we have.
ortype foundry screenshot from The Punch
Or Type. Iceland's first type foundry, Reykjavik since 2013. GUNMAD building experimental faces that challenge convention—Forzata, Boogie School, Landnáma. Nordic vernacular with teeth.
www.thepunch.studio/foundry/or-type
Most typographic history is the story of convenience winning over intention. What survives is usually whatever required the least effort to maintain.
The pilcrow ¶ started as a C for capitulum (chapter). Scribes drew it to mark new paragraphs. When printing arrived, compositors left space for hand-drawn pilcrows. Eventually everyone stopped bothering. Now it only exists to show hidden formatting.
general foundry screenshot from The Punch
General Type Studio. Stéphane Elbaz building clean variable fonts from Montreal since 2019. Cambon, Pilat, General Grotesque. Free for personal use, paid when you ship. Licensing that trusts designers.
www.thepunch.studio/foundry/general-type-studio
Loud Room foundry screenshot from The Punch
Loud Room. Jason Santa Maria built web typography for two decades—Typekit, A Book Apart, On Web Typography. Now he's making type himself. Citywide and Chonk from Philadelphia. The teacher becomes the practitioner.
www.thepunch.studio/foundry/loud-room
The 'long s' (ſ) was not an f. It was an s used at the beginning and middle of words until the 1800s. Then it vanished. Every time someone reads 'Congrefs' in an old document and laughs, a typographer dies a little.
Etcetera Type Company. Tyler Finck building open-source variable fonts from Ithaca since 2018. Epilogue alone has 860 million Google Fonts views. NYT, Boston Globe, WSJ clients. Open source as philosophy, not marketing.
www.thepunch.studio/foundry/etcetera-type-company-etc
Four foundries shipped Optima revivals in 2025. When AI threatens type design, the instinct is to reach back—to calligraphy, to the human hand. micahblachman.beehiiv.com/p/the-optima-l-situation
mckl foundry screenshot from The Punch
MCKL Type. Jeremy Mickel building American vernacular from Los Angeles since 2012. Uber, adidas, LA28 Olympics on the client list. Fort, Router, Shift—display faces with muscle.
www.thepunch.studio/foundry/mckl-type
marksimonson foundry screenshot from The Punch
Mark Simonson Studio. Forty years of typographic experience from St. Paul, Minnesota. Proxima Nova alone powers half the web. Twenty-five years of independence in an industry that consolidates everything.
www.thepunch.studio/foundry/mark-simonson
Every time Monotype acquires another foundry, the homogenization of type accelerates. The antidote isn't nostalgia—it's supporting indies who still treat type as craft, not content.
Screenshot from The Punch
NaN. Luke Prowse building variable fonts from Berlin since 2019. Fair Font Pricing adjusts costs by country. Jaune, Holo, Tragedy—experimental faces with technical depth. Weirdness and wisdom in equal measure.
www.thepunch.studio/foundry/nan
Not obliquely—directly. Sowersby nailed that formulation. The Die Grotesk essay is required reading for anyone who wants to understand why Helvetica discourse never ends.