Type resources for designers and brand owners

Featured article.

Putting AI to work: The magic of typeface pairing.

Have you ever cooked a meal at home and been delighted to find the perfect ingredient to complement your recipe? Maybe you forgot you had cilantro, crushed peanuts, or lemon juice, and it’s just the thing you needed to elevate your dish.

What’s new.

Monotype’s company desktop license empowers cloud access to brand fonts.

Long gone are the days of zipping up folders of font files and sharing them across your organization, or even messier, embedding fonts in documents in the cloud in hopes that the design remains intact. We recently announced an expanded set of licensing rights which allows all employees within an organization to access Commercial Production Fonts in their desktop environments. 

Creative Characters S2 E8: Andrew Krivine and Michael Worthington.

This week we’re welcoming Andrew Krivine, author and punk rock collector, alongside Michael Worthington, faculty at CalArts and co-founder of Counterspace. The creative duo is here to tell the tale of how they co-created the largest exhibition of punk and new wave graphics ever shown on the West Coast.   

Monotype x Limerick.

Over the past four years, we’ve been lucky to forge a reciprocal partnership with the Limerick School of Art & Design / TUS in Ireland. Both Creative Type Directors Tom Foley and Emilios Theofanous have now participated in workshops and modules at the leading fine art, design and creative media school. This year’s students were asked to write a message platform for one typeface and build a marketing plan and design assets to promote it in digital or print media.  

Font resources for brands.

8 Common mistakes to avoid when choosing brand fonts.

When you’re a designer, it’s thrilling to create a new brand or update an existing one. You get to be creative! Strategic! You get a chance to make your mark!

In addition to deciding on a color palette and imagery style, you get to choose foundational typefaces for your brand. But font selection should not be based on looks alone.

How an increased focus on digital transformation has changed customer branding expectations.

Today’s designers are faced with a multitude of new challenges when it comes to designing for a digital world. Customers expect constant communication, have short attention spans, and expect brands to keep up with emerging technology. Learn about the branding challenges to advance your digital strategy and forge ahead.

What creative leaders need to consider in a brand refresh.

You’re at your desk reviewing your emails, and getting ready to kickstart a new design project tomorrow. You’ve read over the project brief, and you have a team call coming up to go over the project guidelines. It’s an exciting challenge, but you’re not sure where to begin.
 

Get inspired.

Creative Characters S3 E3: Getting into the ‘heavy stuff’ with Aaron James Draplin.

We are thrilled to have Aaron Draplin on the podcast this week and to dig into the “heavy stuff” with him – existential musings on life and building a career, the importance of hanging on to your inner kid, and the “weird little spot” he’s in as he approaches 50 turns around the sun.

7 Typographic rebrands that worked wonders.

Today’s brands must keep up with a fast-paced digital world and navigate a “new normal” that’s still emerging from the worst of the pandemic. The last few years shifted everyone’s digital expectations, how brands operate, and in some cases, impacted their business models. Moreover, issues like biodiversity, sustainability, diversity and equity, and brand activism are all booming. So how does this all impact brand building? These macro shifts are greatly influencing how companies position themselves, the services they offer, and how they communicate with their customers.

Font expertise from the Monotype Studio.

Typography terms and definitions.

From alternates to X-height, this list of typography terms and definitions covers just about everything you’d want to know about fonts and typography.

What are font superfamilies and why do we need them?

Font superfamilies are vast collections of type that can meet a multitude of needs without compromising on consistency. But what defines a superfamily, exactly?

What’s in a letterform?

A letter is more than the sum of its parts, but sometimes it helps to know what those parts are called. And it may not surprise you to learn that in a field as meticulous as typography, every little piece of a letter has a name.

All resources.

Artificial Intelligence journey at Monotype

Our lives are becoming increasingly digital, and the part of our digital life that’s grown the most in recent years is e-commerce. Whether ordering something from Amazon or browsing a clothing site for the perfect new shirt, it’s getting easier and easier to find what we’re looking for online. But as it stands, there are still some ways that search and discovery on many fonts-related e-commerce sites can be improved — such as by using machine learning to help inform their results.

GPU text rendering techniques.

Text rendering is an important component in the design of modern graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and digital media. With the increasing demand for high-quality graphics, animation and real-time rendering, the use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for text rendering has become a popular solution.

Creative Characters S3 E7: Exploring all things novel and familiar with Mark Simonson.

Mark Simonson has designed some of the most widely used typefaces in the world. Host Charles Nix sits down to talk influences, process, and why truly memorable work – such as Simonson’s versatile, legible, and wildly ubiquitous Proxima Nova – has to be “both novel and familiar.”

How to find a legible font.

Legibility is a crucial consideration when trying to choose a font for your project. Here’s how to find a legible font that will be easy on the eyes for your readers and customers.

Q&A from the 2023 Type Trends Webinar.

We recently presented our 2023 Type Trends report during a lively, interactive webinar. Our Creative Type Directors and report curators, Emilios Theofanous and Terrance Weinzierl, walked through the projects featured in the report to a global audience of over 1,300 live attendees. There were too many thoughtful questions to answer during the Q&A, so we’ve taken the time to answer them below. Enjoy!  

Picsart x Monotype: A dynamic collaboration that empowers creators around the world.

Monotype and Picsart have built a partnership that’s fueling creativity for Picsart’s 150 million monthly global users. Picsart, the world’s largest digital creation platform, allows creators of all levels to design, edit, draw, and share photo and video content. The platform has amassed one of the world’s largest open-source content collections with its assortment of photos, stickers, backgrounds, templates, and more. Monotype-supplied fonts are one of the most popular elements in the creation of these content types; in 2022, fonts were used in more than 1 billion editing sessions on the Picsart platform.

Webinar: Type Trends 2023 & How to Use Them

When it comes to trends, timing is everything.

Creative Characters S3 E6: Bringing design to the masses with Canva’s Andrew Green.

Monotype’s Executive Creative Director, Charles Nix, sat down with Canva’s Head of Design, Andrew Green, to talk about his own international career beginning at agencies in New York and Hong Kong and circling back to Canva, where he now oversees the design leadership team in Melbourne.