2024: Our Year in Review

Typotheque reflects on its 25th year: advancing type for minority languages, working on information accessibility and inclusivity. 🌍🔤✨

Each year, we write this summary as we look back on the past twelve months, and we usually like to begin with the bigger picture—because before we are designers, we are humans, inhabiting the same planet as the rest of us. 🌍 The world is complex, and changes rarely come easily. There are ongoing wars and conflicts, and reckless decisions of those in power often leave us disheartened. 🗯️ Yet, amidst it all, we hold fast to the small things we can control—the choices we make, the values we stand by—ensuring that the world we disagree with doesn’t shape who we are.

This year Typotheque celebrated its 25th anniversary. It was a moment to pause and reflect on our achievements, to consider our priorities, and align them with our studio practices. ⚖️ For over two decades we’ve been committed to supporting and accurately rendering the world's languages, especially those that are digitally disadvantaged.🌐🔠 This work, informed by our ongoing cognitive and regional research, now has its own webpage🔎📚 showcasing the projects we’ve completed in 2024. Highlights include research on Braille use and preferences, conducted with ONCE (Blind Association of Spain) and the Blind Association of Split (Croatia) 🧑‍🦯, as well as a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Handwriting Research on familiarity effect in the perception of handwriting, and a research on designing typefaces for users with low vision.📓 This is the applied research we conducted to create Zed typeface, a typeface optimised for information accessibility. ℹ️ Zed is our largest project to date, and it will continue to grow as we release the 20 planned fonts.✨ We are proud that the project has been recognised by design critics, winning the Gold European Award for 2024 🏆.

Our research and work have been shared in numerous public presentations—through Typotheque Club talks, online platforms like Type@Cooper, and at festivals, conferences, and educational institutions in cities such as Paris 🇫🇷, Venice 🇮🇹, Basel 🇨🇭, Leeds 🇬🇧, Bratislava 🇸🇰, and beyond.

Our work with the Heiltsuk Nation, whose traditional homeland is in British Columbia 🇨🇦, led to the addition of the missing characters to Unicode. Watch this video explaining the process, or read more about our research into the indigenous languages of North America. We are working on a language database of typographic knowledge on how to represent minority languages, and are looking for volunteers to work on specific language groups. If you know of underrepresented regions or languages, please reach out. 💌

Our team has also grown this year, and we’re delighted to welcome Mint Tantisuwanna and Rafał Buchner, graduates of the Type & Media programme at KABK. Their skills and experience will enrich our future projects. 🙏

We completed a number of custom type projects with significant public impact: new typefaces for the Paris transport network Ⓜ️, used by over a billion people a year; new typefaces for Ford Motors 🚘, to be used on millions of their vehicles from 2026; new typefaces for the Monterey Bay Aquarium 🐟, visited by two million people a year. ☑️

Looking ahead to 2025, we’re excited to share what’s next. Zed Icons will be our first release of the year 🚻, followed by our Thai font collection 🇹🇭 in the first quarter, and, after five years of development, the long-anticipated CJK font collection. Additional research and projects will continue our work toward language justice—breaking down barriers, creating equitable opportunities, and fostering a world where everyone can access information and express themselves fully in their own language. 🔜

🧡 Greetings from all of us at Typotheque, Peter, Johanna, Nikola, Liang, Marlis, Kevin, Héctor, Mint and Rafał