Information

Hyperfount is an independent type foundry. We publish serif typefaces drawn from sixteenth-century models and built to the tolerances of modern hardware.

The studio opened in the year 2000 with a single question: what would the punchcutters have made with a machine that never tired? The catalogue now stands at 6 families and 45 styles, each one drawn slowly and released when it is finished.

We sell direct. No resellers, no subscriptions, no font-of-the-month.

A typeface is a drawing and a piece of software at once. The six notes below describe the software half: what is inside every font file we ship, and why.

Weights are spaced on a curve, not a ruler. Equal steps in stem thickness look uneven to the eye, so each named weight is placed where the step looks equal, then corrected by hand.

Getting heavier is not only adding weight. Counters close, joins clog, and the structure of a letter has to change to stay itself.

Every family starts on paper. Software makes curves quickly and makes them all the same; the hand keeps the small differences that let a page of text feel alive.

Each glyph goes through several rounds of printed proofs and drawn corrections before a single point is moved on screen.

Every family covers 42 languages written in the Latin script. Accents are drawn for each letter and weight, not dropped on from a component library, and checked by readers of the language.

Need a language or a script we do not cover yet? We extend families on request.

OpenType lets one font carry more than its basic alphabet: ligatures that mend awkward letter pairs, true fractions, and figures in more than one width.

Each typeface page lists the features found in that font and lets you switch them on in the tester.

Vertical metrics tell software where the baseline sits and how much room a line needs. Three tables hold them, each read by a different system. Ours agree with each other, so a line of text sits in the same place in a design tool, a browser and a native app.

A font is stored as outlines. At small sizes those outlines have to be fitted to a coarse grid of pixels, and a hairline can vanish or double. Hinting is the set of instructions that keeps stems even and heights aligned when that happens.

Text families are hinted for the sizes people read at. Display families are left unhinted on purpose: they are not meant to be small.

We draw type on commission:

• A typeface of your own, from a single display cut to a full family.
• Extensions of a catalogue family: new weights, widths, scripts or glyphs.
• Wordmark and logotype refinement.
• Exclusive licences for a catalogue family, by territory or by sector.

Most commissions run six to sixteen weeks. Send a short brief and we will reply with a scope and a price.

Start a commission

hello@hyperfount.example

Licensing questions, upgrades, press, teaching and everything else. A person answers, usually within a working day.

This site is set in the foundry’s own families. The interface type is Michroma, Silkscreen and Doto.

Mock-up note: the “foundry’s own families” shown here are EB Garamond and the Cormorant family, both under the SIL Open Font License and served by Google Fonts, as are the three interface faces. The foundry, its history, its prices and its licence terms are placeholders.