FontShop International

The Typo San Francisco conference in 2014 was organised by FontShop.

After founding the first German reseller of typefaces FontShop on June 12 1991, Joan Spiekermann, Erik Spiekermann, and Neville Brody started an independent type foundry just one year later. They commissioned a few young type designers to make the first few FontFonts. The first font ever was FF Beowolf by the Dutch Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum in 1990. It was called a “living” font because it used a random feature of the PostScript language to generate randomly different letter forms each time when printed. The library has grown over the years by numerous FF releases (being 59 until May 2012[3]) and is now one of the world’s largest collections of contemporary type designs.

Between 1991 and 2000 FontShop International published together with Neville Brody 18 issues of the experimental typographical magazine FUSE and organised several FUSE conferences, the forerunners of the annual European design conference TYPO Berlin.

In 2001, FontShop International founded their own stock photo agency called ƒStop and introduced it to the stock photography market.

FontShop International is licensor for four FontShops in Austria, Benelux, Germany, and the United States. FontShop USA, based in San Francisco, is owned by FontShop International; all the other FontShops are separate, independent companies concentrating on their own markets. While FontShop International publishes typefaces as a foundry, the FontShops work as resellers of FontShop International’s FontFonts but also of fonts from other foundries.

FontShop International’s legal form is GmbH.

The main focus at FontShop International is the extension and maintenance of the FontFont typeface library. Fonts published as FontFonts are always named using the prefix FF. Besides text and headline fonts such as FF Dax, FF DIN, FF Meta, FF Quadraat, and FF Scala there are also special designs like the “dirty” or grunge typography typewriter font FF Trixie, the “living” font FF Beowolf and digital handwriting fonts FF Erikrighthand and FF Justlefthand (FF Hands package). The library now consists of over different 700 font families.

Type designers may submit their own type designs for publication in the FontFont library. A committee of internal experts (TypeBoard) reviews submissions for aesthetical, technical, and marketing aspects and decides about publication in the library. A basic prerequisite is that the type designs are original.

FontShop International is also publisher of the FontBook. The FontBook is an independent compendium of digital typefaces. The first edition was published in 1991 and revised and extended three times to show as many new and updated typefaces as possible. The latest fourth edition from September 2006 contains 1,760 pages with showings of 32,000 typefaces by 90 international foundries, being the largest printed type reference book of the world. In addition to the type specimens, users can find information about the type designer, year of publication, style category, language versions and see-also references to similar alternate typefaces.[4]

In 2011, FontShop International published the first digital version of the FontBook. The iPad app contains 620,000 typeface specimens by 110 international type foundries.[5]

FontShop International also publishes the image library fStop, named as a reference to the f-numbers of photography. At present, 22,000 royalty-free photos by 150 photographers are offered (December 2008). The images are distributed directly as well as via some of the FontShops and Getty Images.

FontStruct.com is a website where registered users can create, share and download modular, grid-based typefaces. The idea was successfully pitched by Meek Design to FontShop in 2006".[6] FontStruct is a free font-building tool, as described on its website home page, "Build, Share, Download Fonts. It's simple and free!". To register, users have to give a email address or username, and a password.

• Spiekermann, Erik; Middendorp, Jan: Made with FontFont, Book Industry Services (BIS): 2006, ISBN 978-90-6369-129-5
• Thi Truong, Mai-Linh; Siebert, Jürgen; Spiekermann, Erik: FontBook – Digital Typeface Compendium, FSI FontShop International: 2006, ISBN 978-3-930023-04-2
• Jubert, Roxane, Typography and Graphic Design, From Antiquity to the Present. Flammarion: 2006, ISBN 2-08-030523-9
• Schuler, Günter: Typomarken, Markentypo – Die Herkunft der Schriften in Libraries, in Publishing Praxis: 1–2/2008. 14. Jahrgang, Deutscher Drucker Verlagsgesellschaft: 2008, ISSN 0948-1931

• FontFont
• FontShop
• FontBook
• fStop
• List of fonts on Identifont