Hello, we are ILT and we are font activists.
We, like the name says, love typography and we love the people in it. The talented designers, the independent foundries, and the boundless joy of bringing into visual form the words that we want to speak.
We are a brand centered on the love of type, the celebration of its immense powers, and the sense of community that binds all those who love type, together. To that end, we’ve built a curated font store that celebrates excellence and creativity in type design, so that finding the right typeface is a joy and not a headache.
We are font activists, and we fight for building a healthy ecosystem where indie foundries can flourish.
We are font activists, and we fight for making type education accessible across the geographical and linguistic divides that separate us. We fight to demystify font business.
We are font activists, and we fight to expand our design space and design thinking, and to celebrate the multitudes of design expression.
Yes, we fight. Foundries are being squeezed out of their own rights, forced to accept the unacceptable. The future looks bleak and the ability of independent foundries and designers to make a living with type diminishes every day. This casts a long shadow over the future of our creative industry. But another future is still possible, and that is what we’re here for. This is why we launched a store exactly two years ago today.
It’s been a busy two years, and not easy in the least. We launched with a cohort of 40 foundries, and we are now with 83, and more on the way! We introduced CEDARS+, a new type descriptor system that can help expand how we think and talk about typefaces. We launched the ILT Academy offering courses and workshops in type design, typography, and font production. We’ve offered courses in English, Arabic, and Japanese — with plans for more. We’ve offered seminars on font business matters in order to help foundries better understand their rights. We’ve hosted a Font Fashion Week to celebrate new font releases. And we’ve designed more than a thousand type specimens, because we love type and we know you love it too.
Thank you for being part of our journey; thank you for standing by our side. Here’s to many more years of type, and many more celebrations of the beauty of its outlines.
