Design studios across the creative industry are increasingly developing their own custom typefaces, transforming typography from a background element to the backbone of brand identity. This shift represents a fundamental change in how brands approach visual communication, with custom fonts becoming essential infrastructure rather than decorative afterthoughts.
Elizabeth Goodspeed, a design expert and writer, explains that there comes a point in every brand designer's career when the appeal of type design becomes irresistible. Her own journey into typography began nearly a decade ago when she enrolled in the intensive TypeCooper program, spending 162 hours over five weeks perfecting letterforms. Despite creating her typeface "Vamp," she quickly realized that full-time type design wasn't her calling, though the experience highlighted the growing desire among designers for greater control over their typography.
The transformation of typography's role in branding has been dramatic. Throughout most of the 20th century, brands treated typography as organizational background rather than expressive backbone. Post-war modernist design favored neutral workhorses like Helvetica and Univers, which projected corporate universality over emotional specificity. Even during the expressive wave of the late 1960s and 1970s, exemplified by Herb Lubalin Associates' work for brands like Leggs, distinctive lettering typically remained confined to wordmarks and headlines while broader identity systems defaulted to pragmatic typefaces.
Today's brands expect typography to accomplish everything simultaneously: carry tone and emotion while maintaining functionality across billboards, packaging, and app icons. In the crowded, UI-dominated landscape of social media, strong letterforms help brands cut through visual noise. Unlike photographs that are too specific to simplify or colors that are too generic to own, typography offers the perfect balance of boldness and flexibility while literally spelling out the brand's name.
This shift is particularly pronounced for companies without tangible products to showcase, such as Software-as-a-Service companies, AI startups, and fintech firms whose offerings exist purely in code or service. Creative studio Koto's identity for Faculty, a London-based applied AI company, exemplifies this approach, relying almost entirely on a custom typeface called Faculty Glyphic, an Albertus-inspired serif that works alongside compositional structures and gradients to communicate the organization's mission.
Jesse Reed, co-founder of design studio Order and their Order Type Foundry, notes that many of their clients are information-driven organizations selling ideas rather than images. For these brands, typography functions as core infrastructure, serving as both a device and tool that enables proper communication. Once typography became infrastructure, the logic of creating custom solutions followed naturally.
The emotional and practical benefits of custom typography are compelling. Brooklyn design studio RM's work for Bankers Anchor, a public plaza in Greenpoint, demonstrates how tailored type creates connective tissue between form and concept. The studio developed "Triad," a typeface whose triangular counterforms and crossed contours reference the plaza's real-world triangular footprint – a unique geometry no existing typeface could accommodate. Ryan Bugden, RM's co-founder, considers custom type as a differentiator essentially given, typically becoming the glue that binds entire identities together.
Economic factors also drive the custom type movement. Over the past decade, companies like Monotype have shifted toward subscription-based licensing models that tie font fees to metrics like web traffic and app usage. This pay-for-play approach, once reserved for web fonts, now applies to desktop use including logos and core brand assets traditionally covered by one-time fees. Monotype's Standard plan costs $20,500 annually for five users, including five commercial fonts with usage capped at 20 million page views and 10 million digital ad impressions. The cheaper option at $2,500 per year offers three typefaces with monthly limits of 1.5 million page views.
By comparison, independent foundries like Dinamo offer one-time commercial licenses. A single cut of their Marfa typeface for a 5,000-employee company costs approximately $10,500 but includes desktop, app, web, social media, video, and logo usage plus third-party sharing rights permanently. Dylan Young, senior type designer at Koto, recalls troubling stories of subscription licenses significantly impacting small businesses unable to afford thousands in annual licensing fees.
Technological accessibility has also democratized type creation. Software like Glyphs now costs $299 in 2025, compared to $450 for Robofont in 2017, making custom type development more feasible for studios. Many can now prototype fonts in-house and integrate development costs into branding projects from the beginning, eliminating the need for separate budgets and outside specialists.
Approximately two dozen studios now create typefaces alongside client work, including Order's OTF, Walsh's Type of Feeling, and Koto's in-house capabilities. The list extends to Parker, Outline, Center, Andrea Trabucco-Campos's team at Pentagram, Gretel, The Working Assembly, Studio HanLi, and Land. Some, like Order, sell fonts to other designers as natural extensions of their existing positions, while others like Koto develop custom fonts exclusively for clients.
However, studio-led type creation faces significant challenges. Working within client timelines often means producing fonts faster than traditional foundries, potentially compromising quality. Independent type designer Flavia Zimbardi observes that few studios fully understand the complexity and cost of creating quality typefaces. The pressure for speed can encourage treating typefaces as one-off deliverables rather than long-term tools that must withstand thousands of applications and contexts.
Kris Sowersby of Klim Type notes that many brands now treat typography like seasonal assets to be refreshed with trends rather than invested in as lasting infrastructure. This approach often results in conceptually shallow fonts that solve narrow visual problems but cannot sustain long-term use. Many new brand fonts rely on single gimmicks while leaving underlying letter structures untouched, such as YouTube Sans, which angles its terminals like Play buttons but remains essentially generic underneath.
Some studio-made fonts suffer from technical issues including rough kerning, limited language support, and amateur point placement. Others fall into redundancy traps, mimicking familiar models like ITC Garamond Condensed without the refinement of proper revivals or meaningful reinterpretation. Zimbardi suggests that semi-custom work, where experienced type designers modify their own typefaces, often provides smarter, more durable solutions than rushing to build from scratch.
Despite these challenges, the democratization of type design offers significant advantages. Historically, type design has been dominated by a small, primarily white, male, Western group of specialists accessing the field through expensive graduate programs or lengthy apprenticeships. Expanded access to tools, education, and distribution has opened doors to diverse designers bringing new cultural references, priorities, and aesthetics to the field.
Many canonical type designers started informally themselves, fueled by trial software and passion for letterforms. Thierry Blancpain of Grilli Type recalls launching with single-weight typefaces containing numerous mistakes, celebrating their newcomer status. More people creating type means more ideas, risk-taking, and stylistic invention, with Type of Feeling's philosophy being "If it makes you feel something, it's worth making."
Studio-led type design may also provide safer entry paths into the field. Traditional type design careers have always been precarious, with fonts taking months or years to complete, offering no guaranteed income during development, and generating revenue only if they sell successfully. By treating type as part of broader studio practices, designers, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, can develop skills without gambling entire livelihoods on retail font sales.
Young's self-taught path through branding environments demonstrates that formal education isn't the only route into type design, provided real mentorship exists. However, such access remains rare. Many designers in branding studios begin drawing type independently and continue working in isolation as skills develop. The traditional apprenticeship model within type foundries, where experienced peers provided feedback and guidance on production standards and professional sustainability, has largely eroded.
Zimbardi observes expansion in advanced education and increasingly sophisticated type tools, but notes significant gaps in mentorship and critical feedback. When internal feedback loops are missing, underdeveloped ideas too easily become finished fonts. As Sowersby bluntly states, "The only feedback people get now is Instagram likes."
The broader implications for the type design field are concerning. As studios bring type design in-house, steady revenue streams that once supported independent type designers are diminishing. Custom lettering, semi-custom wordmarks, and brand fonts that previously provided diversified work for specialists now often stay within studios, frequently drawn by interns or generalists without deep training. This model currently functions by leveraging the existing type ecosystem of tools, standards, and infrastructure built by full-time professionals, but that ecosystem becomes harder to sustain as fewer people can make living wages as type designers.
Goodspeed concludes with lessons from her TypeCooper experience: making a typeface is easy, but making a good typeface is not. Type design isn't a quick solution but rather a slow, stubborn craft that resists shortcuts and rewards designers willing to take the long road. The fundamental challenge remains balancing increased accessibility and creative diversity with maintaining the professional standards and economic sustainability that support quality typography.