Fontdue is an e-commerce platform designed to simplify the process of selling fonts and managing purchases for independent type foundries. At its core is a dashboard that helps you manage your font catalogue and customer orders, along with a set of tools to build and run a foundry website. Fontdue is used by over 50 independent foundries, including our partners such as the Schrift Foundry.

Schrift Foundry, a Fontdue partner

You are a web developer and could have worked in any other industry. How did you end up working with type designers?

I went to design school, but I was a self-taught web developer before that. During design school, I got the chance to do a type design class with Jean François Porchez, which led me to Type@Cooper. So, I studied type design. It turned out I was much more capable as an engineer than a designer. But having design in my education definitely helps me as an engineer.

Did you release the typefaces you created while studying at Cooper?

No, I have never finished a typeface, unfortunately. I’m not sure if I will be able to return to that practice, but I would like to. I really respect the people who can do it all the way through because it’s hard!

Where did you go to design school before Type@Cooper?

I went to college in Australia at the University of Queensland and also studied at the University of Washington, where one of my teachers was Karen Cheng, the author of Designing Type.

Do you have Australian type foundries at Fontdue now?

Yeah, at least a couple: Troy Leinster, Modern Type, and Metis.

Metis, a Fontdue partner
Modern Type, a Fontdue partner
Leinster Type, a Fontdue partner

How did you come up with the idea of creating Fontdue?

It started with my friend Stéphane Elbaz, whom I was working with for many years at First Look Media. Stéphane asked me to help him build the website for his type foundry, General Type Studio, so I started researching how to do that.

I saw an opportunity there because it seemed like everyone was doing the same thing over and over again, reinventing the wheel every time they built a custom type foundry website. It seemed like a natural fit for a new product. I had worked for Hoefler & Co. for about a year, so I had a little bit of insight into the workings of a type foundry, and I had also been wanting to build my own product and company for a long time. So solving a problem at the intersection of type and development was a logical continuation of my background.

General Type, a Fontdue partner

Who else except you is working on the project? Can you give a team rundown?

It’s been mostly me over the years, and I’ve had help from a handful of collaborators. Early on, I collaborated with Stephen Cronin, who is a front-end developer. I have also had various back-end engineers helping me, including Svilen Gospodinov and Derek Kraan. Paul Sabou is helping with the back end now, Josh Thompson with frontend, and my friend Eliot Mueting is helping with business development. Jonny Sikov, Nick Simmons, and Erkin Karamemet have had a hand in design, and Peter Nowell is getting started in his capacity as a designer and developer.

How did you come up with the name for the project?

I knew this was gonna come up. There’s no real story there. I was just looking for funny names, and somehow Fontdue stuck. I think there’s something loosely related to commerce in the name, and also it’s a funny pun.

When I first heard about Fontdue, I thought there was no “t” in the middle and was too shy to ask how to spell it, so I couldn’t Google the project.

Oh no, I haven’t heard that before today, but that’s very interesting. It’s something to think about, for sure.

Plain Form, a Fontdue partner

Imagine I come to you and say I wanna build my foundry with Fontdue. What’s the next step?

There are a few different options you have, depending on both your budget and your technical capacity. I usually tell people that what we recommend is that you build your own website with any tool or any collaborator you want, and you can integrate our APIs and JavaScript into your own website. That’s probably the best path.

The cheapest and easiest path is to use our demo template, which you can use for your site, but it has only minimal customisation options. One of our goals is to allow foundries to retain their own identity, and we definitely wanna support deeper customisation in the future.

There is a third option, which is that we can implement custom designs. The foundries will design the mock-up for how they want the site to look, and we can implement the mock-up and work with them to bring their design vision to life. We usually work with them to figure out the most cost-effective solutions that take advantage of our existing components and infrastructure to make sure that we’re not rebuilding stuff that already exists.

The layout with a big character on the left and the full character set on the right — is that one of your demo templates? Before I knew Fontdue existed, I was curious: why is everyone doing this?

Yes. We have these drop-in components that help show the typeface, like that one with a complete character set. Sometimes, it just makes sense for everyone to use the same functionality.

Michaux by Plain Form
Antic by Manic Type

You are the founder and developer, and the components are also designed by you, right?

Yes, the back end and standard components, like widgets, were designed by me, and I’m continuing to try to improve those.

How did you come up with your financial model? Fontdue charges $49 per month and a 5% fee on each sale

I tried to model what I would need to charge for the project to be sustainable — at least to pay me to work on it full-time. After some number of years, I did reach that threshold of sustainability. So I’m able to work on it full-time myself, and I’m also able to get help when I need it from contractors. The model has proven to be successful so far. There are maybe some cases where it doesn’t work, and we are evaluating options.

What is the enterprise plan for?

The enterprise option is kind of a catch-all, but we offer customisation services.So if a foundry really needs a new feature that we don’t currently offer, we have a path forward in terms of charging to work on those special features. And there are maybe some foundries that have extra requirements, extra needs in terms of support. So we can craft a custom plan for those.

PSTL, a Fontdue partner

Is it possible to rebuild a marketplace like type.today with Fontdue?

I think so. We should be able to build all the features that you have. We could recreate — or you could even recreate — all of the existing interactions that you have on your website but using Fontdue just as the back end and as e-commerce infrastructure.

So our goal is to make your website as customised as you want while using Fontdue for the heavy lifting of the payment infrastructure and orders. And there are a few other big ones that we do — like the test fonts feature, which takes a long time to build from scratch.

You know why we probably can not transfer to Fontdue? Because some of the countries we work with do not support Stripe.

That’s something that I would like to figure out — how to support more markets. Basically, our plan is to offer a way to use Fontdue as a merchant of record, which would slightly change how customers interact with your store. It would necessarily say Powered by Fontdue, I think, but it would allow you to sell fonts through Fontdue more easily.

Where are your clients mostly from — Europe, I guess?

I think Europe is probably our biggest market. And then the United States is probably the second biggest. But our goal is to support anyone around the world.

Public Type, a Fontdue partner

What’s the biggest technical challenge in building Fontdue so far?

It’s hard to name just one. I would say one of the unexpected challenges is tax compliance. That is something that I’m working on — trying to simplify it both for foundries and Fontdue. We don’t have a solution yet, but I think we are moving towards one that will take advantage of the Stripe Tax, which didn’t exist when I first built Fontdue.

Do you think that the emergence of your project has led to the rise of new independent young foundries?

Yeah, I do think that we are enabling some type designers who wouldn’t have created their own foundry otherwise. And that’s definitely one of our missions: to allow the creation of new small foundries.

Peregrin, a Fontdue partner

Do you have any limitations concerning the language the foundry site’s interface will be in?

Today we don’t have great locale support. We kind of expect the language of your store to be English, as the checkout experience is English only. That’s something that I want to address in the future. I think it’s important to be able to support people who speak different languages, and it’s definitely something that we want to do better. But it’s surely another technical challenge.

If I want to build my Foundry site with you, would you want to check the quality of my fonts?

No, we’re not doing any approving per se. I think if we did add any kind of validation or anything like that, it would not be for approval purposes. It would just be for the foundries to be able to check their own fonts against certain standards, maybe some tools similar to Fontbakery.

Do you have some kind of ethical requirements?

That’s a great question. I think that if people were trying to sell pirated fonts, we would not allow them. Besides that, I think I would take it on a case-by-case basis.

We haven’t really had any ethical questions to address yet. But if we did, I think we might have more policies in place.

Fontdue deals with a huge number of fonts. How do you store all that collection? GitHub?

We use GitHub for code, but the actual font files are stored in our database. it’s a good and a bad thing. For security purposes, it’s a good thing. The files are not available at a URL except for the web fonts, but the source files for those are also not directly exposed.

Mass-Driver, a Fontdue partner

Why doesn’t Fontdue have any socials?

I’ve been a little shy to present publicly. My excuse is that I’ve been busy building stuff to be more active on social media. But I think this year I’m going to try to do a better job of being more public: I’ll be at ATypI in Copenhagen and Typographics in New York.

How did you advertise the project then?

All of the marketing strategy so far has been word of mouth. Basically, I try to make customers happy as much as possible, and they do the marketing for us.

On your personal website, you write that you’re a gardener. Is growing a garden somewhat similar to running Fontdue?

Yeah, that’s very insightful. I do think of the project as a garden for sure. There’s a lot to be learned from growing a garden for running a software project. Especially the fact that if you set a good foundation for the garden, it will grow on its own, and you just have to pay attention to how it’s growing and keep on top of weeding and pruning and so on. It’ll thrive on its own if you’re paying attention to it.

Did you read the fashionable gardening nonfiction books — The Garden Against Time, To Stand and Stare… They tend to say the same thing!

I have a small garden that I work on, and I’m sure I’m not the first one to make this connection between gardening and software product development. But I think I learned the most things about gardening from YouTube.

HanLi, a Fontdue partner

Do you see any other tools that the type design industry is missing right now?

There are a number of things that I think are missing that we have ambitions to try to solve. As Fontdue, we could, I guess, build tools that are related to improving sales and providing better insight into sales information. We also want to simplify and improve how fonts are licensed and distributed. There’s a lot to do within that category.

There are also tools that are missing in terms of the actual font development and production pipeline that I have ideas for, but I’m not sure I’m exactly the right person to solve that. For example, we use Git for code pretty effectively, and type designers use Git for version control, but there aren’t any custom version control tools for fonts, and I think a tool, for example, showing differences between versions of fonts could help the whole industry.

What would you do if some corporation suggested buying Fontdue?

At this stage, I’m not interested in selling the company. My dream with Fontdue is for it to be sustainable forever. If there were a corporation that would be aligned with my goals for Fontdue, I think I would consider it. But I’m not sure that there are many such companies.

What are your goals?

I think, broadly, the mission is to really empower independent type foundries and put more money in the hands of the type designers and try to change consumer habits — make them buy directly from type foundries.

What we don’t want to do is to sort of monopolise the type industry; we are not trying to be greedy.

Mucca Typo, a Fontdue partner

Aren’t you afraid that at some point there will be a moment when there will be too many designers starting their foundries, too many fonts for people to choose from, so that fewer and fewer designers will be able to live off of their designs?

You could say that that is already true! I don’t think having more typefaces in the world is a problem, but, going back to the question about what tools are missing, I think we need better tools for audience development and font discoverability. We’re not trying to solve this problem today, but we’re thinking about it.

There are many foundries that are really good at using Instagram As some members of our team are living in Russia we have to follow the Russian law. According to the law, every time we post links to Instagram or Facebook we have to mention the fact that these socials belong to Meta, which was recognized as extremist by the Ministry of Justice if the Russian Federation and other social media platforms to grow their own audience. And I think that we want to empower the designers to be able to engage with their own audience in the way that suits them best.

In terms of using Instagram, a couple of weeks ago, a big Instagram account, @contemporarytype, started a foundry! Alex Slobzhenninov, who is running it, is a type designer himself, and for a long time his account was an experimental typography gallery.

That’s smart! I think this is just the world we live in now. Influencers, social media, that’s how you get attention, that’s how you sell stuff these days.

I just never thought of an influencer starting a business in type design!

Well, but the well-known type foundries are also effectively influencers, they just use different tools and channels.

Contemporary Type marketplace website

That’s true. Would you consider having a managing partner for Fontdue in the future?

I mentioned I’m bringing a friend of mine in to help me with business development, and we’re trying to figure out the next phase of Fontdue, and how we can continue the path of sustainability, but in a way that is not entirely relying on just me to run it.

I think it is important for Fontdue’s future to bring in more people who can take care of the day-to-day running of the business and develop new features.

Tom Conroy

fontdue.com
tom.conroy.com.au