Fonts Won’t Save the World
Naming this activation Hot & Wet, a perhaps gloomy description of our potential future, helped spark a counterpoint: a belief that optimism in creative action still matters. How we design, and how consciously we use type, can foster more mindful, sustainable systems that create lasting positive change.
We partnered with Bruce Mau Design, a stubbornly optimistic firm, to ask a deceptively simple question:
What role can typography play in a climate crisis?
What we discovered was both humbling and hopeful. Fonts alone can’t save the world — perhaps no surprise — but they can still have a profound impact.
Type and message are inseparable. Through their combined strength, we can change how the world is seen and valued, using design foresight to inspire actions that shape a better tomorrow.
Bruce Mau Design brings an optimism and vibrancy to their brand projects
Why the Environment?
Make no mistake — the climate crisis is now. Every download, every data transfer, every rendered pixel consumes energy. Design happens inside that ecosystem. Fonts, though they may seem comparatively small, have their own role to play.
At Monotype, the environment feels vital — a cultural force reshaping how and why we design.
Because typography isn’t just surface; it’s infrastructure. Fonts live everywhere: on screens, in packaging, across apps, and throughout our cities. Each curve and byte carries an invisible weight. The challenge, then, is one of responsibility. Can the language of design — and language itself — express care for the planet that hosts it?
Creators shape perception, and perception fuels change. When type designers, brands, and developers make conscious choices, they lighten their digital footprint and subtly steer collective behavior toward sustainability.
To guide our exploration, we asked ourselves:
Zanco is a variable font by In-House International, an agency and foundry with a focus on climate work.
Could fonts become “self-aware,” embedding metadata about their own energy use or rating systems to self-react and empower better choices?
Can fonts visualise real-time carbon data — making the invisible visible in design tools?
How much energy does type consume across different platforms and resolutions?
Which writing systems are the most resource-intensive to design and deploy?
Should font libraries include a hard “reset” — a digital declutter for unnecessary data?
Our speculation revealed a typographic ecosystem tightly intertwined with climate impact. To focus our thinking, we distilled five guiding principles:
Zanco is a variable font by In-House International, an agency and foundry with a focus on climate work.
Evidence
Make the invisible visible.
Typography as witness to environmental truth, a medium that exposes hypocrisy as much as it inspires care.
Poster by Walid Bukhari for WeTransfer.
Conservation
Promote digital minimalism.
Use fewer styles, smaller files, and variable fonts. Words can hold the power of many pictures. Delivering the same impact, while keeping things light.
Lush are investing in sustainable energy sources and exploring regenerative material farming to improve product and pack.
Regeneration
Design systems that give back.
Imagine each licensed font offsetting its own design emissions.
Zanco is a variable font by In-House International, an agency and foundry with a focus on climate work.
Emotion
Humanize sustainability.
Use the emotional power of letterforms to connect people with purpose.
A‑Z: Coast to Coast Shore to Shore by Johan Elmehag
Data Visualization
Let fonts react.
Typography that translates environmental data in real time, as a living signal, responsive to its context.
Climate Crisis font by Helsingin Sanomat.
These principles reframed our question: not can typography fix the environment, but instead how can typography reflect and shape our collective response to it?
WePresent invited artists to create protest posters for 2021’s global climate strike.
The True Power of Typography
In a world driven by technology, it’s easy to forget type’s true power — its ability to influence meaning. Fonts are not just software; they’re cultural vessels that carry memory, emotion, and story.
“A typeface is kilobytes of encoded culture in a world of gigabyte media — choose and use it well, and your typography becomes a subtle but serious climate tool.”
Phil Garnham, Executive Creative Director, Monotype
Sustainability in type isn’t only about compression ratios or carbon calculations — though those help. It’s also about longevity. A typeface built to last — adaptable across contexts and decades, sometimes even centuries. These fonts are resistant to the churn of trend and obsolescence. Think: Helvetica, Univers, Frutiger, and Gotham. Timeless type design is, in many ways, ecological design.
Type revivals, too, tell parallel stories. What environmental hopes or anxieties lived when a typeface was first cut? Through that lens, even history becomes a renewable resource.
To tell these stories, we created Climate Chronicle, a project that manifests the power of typography by using it as both medium and message — a language of urgency and optimism at once.
Climate Chronicle is a microsite of rotating, optimistic headlines illustrated with climate-conscious typography.
We live in a time marked by climate change — an era where the realities of environmental collapse are no longer future threats, but daily news. Overwhelmed by depressing narratives, we face a crisis not only of action, but of imagination. We are at a tipping point. Without hopeful, creative visions of what’s possible, we risk collective paralysis. Climate Chronicle is a creative typography project that imagines the climate future we want with audacious possibility. By reimagining tomorrow’s headlines, this project aims to shift the climate narrative from despair to inspiration.
Look below the surface and see that each message is paired with a sustainable design tip — because small technical decisions, multiplied at scale, make real impact.
Switch to renewable energy providers — tangible climate action you can publicize.
Energy and Studio Practice
Specify post-consumer recycled paper stock — reduces virgin pulp demand and demonstrates environmental responsibility in client work.
Materials and Production
Subset fonts for web — Subsetting delivers only the characters needed, lowering site load and emissions.
Digital Design Efficiency
Print only when necessary — default digital proofs avoid needless outputs.
Print and Publishing
Use variable fonts — one file replaces many weights, reducing load across platforms.
Typography and Type Use
These are just some of many, many pointers we have written towards a brighter future.
Behind the scenes, typeface creation consumes measurable energy — and a single Latin design may emit around 2 kg of CO₂. But the real footprint comes once fonts are in global use: every download, every render, every server call. Multiply that by thousands of type families and billions of daily interactions, and small impacts become big. Smarter delivery and broader script support make typography more sustainable for everyone.
Awareness
and Agency
Design is both symptom and solution. The same creativity that shaped the problem can reimagine its answer.
Fonts can’t save the world — but they can speak its truth. With global literacy at an all time high, the written word now shapes how we perceive the world. Fonts remind us that every byte has a body, every screen an atmosphere, every design a consequence. They can move us, provoke us, make us care.
Through Re:Vision, Monotype invites designers everywhere to choose, use, and deploy type not only as a tool of expression but as an act of accountability. The future isn’t about restriction; it’s about abundance used wisely — lighter, longer-lasting, more intentional.
Climate Chronicle is not a manifesto; it’s a mindset — a list of outcomes or goals to pursue with mindful design solutions. A belief that design is never neutral, and that even the smallest digital forms — fonts, words, ideas — can ripple outward toward change.
Typography won’t save the world. But that won’t stop us trying.
Type Trends 2025. The latest in type design, from the Monotype Studio.