Fontyou, the first “Collaborative Type Factory,” offers original fonts and type vectors of high aesthetic and technical quality. The Paris-based initiative’s idea “arose from our belief that typographic creativity derives from the primary users of fonts — graphic designers,” they said in their Creative Characters interview. “Graphic designers are in touch with typography, they are aware of the trends and needs of the moment. But type design as a discipline is still limited to a small group of specialists; changing that was our first goal. So Fontyou is for graphic designers first, especially for students who want to learn about type and typography.”

Their typefaces are co-created with new, up-and-coming design talents who aim to bring a breath of fresh air to typography. “We are all passionate about our common interests: creativity, design, innovation, new technologies, linguistics, interface design. Fontyou is of course a new kind of foundry, but above all it’s a start-up where design, co-creation and technological innovation are at the heart of our strategy.”

Using online tools, Fontyou establishes fruitful relationships between people with complementary skills – lettering artists, type designers, font technicians, and more; resulting in something that’s greater than the sum of its parts – collaborative font designs characterized by their originality, quality, and character.

“We fundamentally believe that being together makes us stronger. We have been doing design and creativity in a collaborative way with our partners, our teams, our customers. We noticed how powerful collaborative work can be with regards to creative quality, rapidity and efficiency of production. This work method promotes the collaboration between complementary profiles. Actually, type design is perfect for co-creation: its object is simple when looking at its smallest unity, a single character — and pluralistic at the same time: an alphabet is a complex multi-dimensional system which offers enough work space for several designers. For all those reasons, we created Fontyou.”