Font Bureau was founded in 1989 by type designer David Berlow and media strategist Roger Black. Headquartered in Boston, MA, the small foundry employs a staff of full-time designers and its library has been contributed to by the likes of Tobias Frere-Jones, Matthew Carter, Jim Parkinson, John Downer, Leslie Cabarga, Cyrus Highsmith, Berlow himself, and others. “In a big way, all the designers whose work is published through Font Bureau are my latest teachers,” Berlow, a recipient of the SoTA Award, says in his Creative Characters interview. “From them I learn how to look at things related to type today from a variety of stylistic and entrepreneurial perspectives.”

Throughout the last quarter of a century, Font Bureau has designed custom typefaces for almost every major American publication and has built a retail library that houses some of the most popular fonts on the market such as bestsellers Interstate and Benton Sans.

“While font technologies continue to evolve, the core principles and skills required to design high quality, worthwhile typefaces have changed little,” Font Bureau states on their website. “The decisions about what designs to produce and how to craft them draw upon a base of typographic knowledge built firmly on hundreds of years of tradition. This remains the essence of what Font Bureau does.”

Berlow’s illustrious career in type design was celebrated when he won the Type Directors Club metal in 2014. “Type designers who lived hundreds and occasionally thousands of years ago are still teaching me, because type design is pretty much infinite,” he says, “and all it takes is a letter you’ve never seen before to incite learning, I think.”