Typotheque new website
Last year, Typotheque celebrated its 10th anniversary. Our website was also basically ten years old and had become an anthill of archaic code with layers and layers of new additions. For a long time we resisted dramatic changes, thinking that our site was the most direct visualisation of the content possible.
At some point, however, it became obvious that we couldn’t keep adding new features forever and needed to rethink the structure of the site. And while Peter had been writing, designing and coding the website for its first ten years, the time had come to find someone with a fresh perspective.
It was a great joy to see someone else reinterpret ten years of our work. Ondrej Jób, the talented multidisciplinary designer of Klimax, undertook the massive task of redesigning Typotheque.com from the ground up. This was not just a reformatting of content. We rethought every section, offering new, more interactive ways to view and work with fonts.
Here are some of the highlights:
Dynamic Text Samples
All text samples are dynamic and generated on the fly, meaning that you can preview all our fonts in any language, or even type your own text. You can even apply OpenType features to see how different numeral styles, small caps and ligatures work with the selected fonts.
See it in HD on Vimeo, or on YouTube instead.
Glyphs
View all the glyphs in the fonts. You can also search or filter glyphs by OpenType features.
<>See it in HD on Vimeo, or on YouTube instead.
Font Combinator
We don’t just show you individual fonts, however; we also help you combine them, recommending, for example, which text typefaces and display typefaces work well together. Try out our new Font Combinator, which lets you see how different fonts work in a variety of sample layouts and download the result in a printable PDF file.
See it in HD on Vimeo, or on YouTube instead.
Visual Demonstration of OpenType Features
Because most Typotheque fonts offer a rich array of advanced OpenType features, we let you preview them directly. All samples are dynamically generated by our Font Tester API, which lets you see exactly how OpenType can work for you.
New ‘Fonts In Use’ Gallery
The best part about running our own foundry is getting feedback from the people who use our fonts in real life. We continuously receive samples, categorising them by language, country, application and execution so you can search our database of images by these attributes. Additionally, each image is tagged with the font names, so you know exactly what you are looking at.
See it in HD on Vimeo, or on YouTube instead.
Tags
And we didn’t stop there. All the content on the website is now tagged so that you can easily browse pages related to a theme. For example, clicking on the ‘dictionary’ tag will give you links to fonts suitable for dictionaries, articles about dictionaries, people who work with dictionaries… Everything has been neatly sorted and cross-linked for you, using hundreds of tags to describe the thousands of pages in our website.
New Licensing Options
Our standard EULA has been modified to make it more useful for the end user. (We’ll explain that in a separate post.) We also provide practical new licensing options such as a self-hosting licence for webfonts or OEM licensing. Best of all, our price calculators give you precise pricing for specific requests.
Thanks!
Finally, big thanks to Ondrej Jób for the website design, SLONline (Luboš Odráška and Peter Bolemant) for coding the website, and Dan Milne, Bram Pitoyo, Mathieu Christe, Tiffany Wardle, Gustavo Ferreira, Christopher Murphy, Simon Pascal Klein and Taco Zwaanswijk for early beta testing. And as always thanks to our editor Ted Whang, who makes sure you can understand what we write.