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When I started working as a typeface designer back in 2015, I was not so excited about the idea of distributing my work on the various platforms available at the time. It might sound like an ego thing but to be honest, for various reasons (distribution, licensing, pricing, foundries’ royalties, etc.) I was not happy with what I saw in the type industry. And I’ve always been keen on being independent anyway. So, the idea of launching my own space was only natural.
Of course, the things I personally wasn’t okay with in the type industry back then are subject to debate even now — whatever floats one’s boat, right —. Anyway, that’s the way I felt and still feel this day when I think about that period of time.
As you could suspect, I had no idea of the amount of work it would be to create something like that. Not only in terms of type design but the whole question of licensing, distribution, the details and technical proofing you put into a font, and of course the whole website design & development. It was quite the adventure and I was eager to start fast. Beside the whole art direction of the foundry, I wanted the website to be a powerful visual experience.
Back then (2016 or so at the time), most type foundries had, imho, a rather 'austere' look. It looked a bit like old school type specimen if you get my meaning. Some kind of “neutral” feeling to let the fonts speak for themselves more than putting them into design context (like an "in use" kind of way), which is totally fine of course: being a fan of these kind of things myself.
We took full advantage of Marquee3000 and it was quite refreshing to have fonts moving around in various shapes and colours. Trying to have this balance between animated font and a still legible and navigable website is challenging. But we were happy of the results.
The website launched on the 4th of November 2017. It was a fun day because OVH (the server provider we used to host our server & domain) went down in Europa at the time. (Crazy to say that years later the same data center burnt and we were close to losing everything)
I have to say I didn’t expect this type venture to be the success it is. Having a background in graphic design and art direction, end even though type design as a whole practice was something that I devoted myself to, my work as a type designer had never been publicly displayed and I was not really identified as a “type designer” per say back then.
I’m quite happy to share that over our 5 years of existence we’ve had over thirty thousand people choosing to either try or use our fonts in their projects. I guess passion, dedicated work, sacrifices, meeting the right people and a community who relates to you can kick things up in the best kind of way. But no matter what we do, no matter what we design and release, this is all happening because of you all.
Blaze Type turning into a foundry/studio gave me the opportunity to grow a duo of designers to a larger team, we are now a team of over ten people of various profiles and backgrounds from all around the world: graphic designers, type designers, developers, motion designers, photographers and so on.
One of the main goal of Blaze Type is to promote young talents, young type designers, wherever they are.
We have tons of ideas and perspective of projects and are always looking for people to work with, no matter the size of the project: the more the merrier.
Several years later: we’re now in 2022, we had the opportunity to work on several custom works (some are showcased in our blog section, more to come here!) our retail fonts have been used and displayed all around the world by freelancers, studios, agencies and students. There’s still so much more ahead of us and this new website will allow us to bring forward all the different projects we are eager to share with you.
The idea of working on a 2.0 version of our website came when we wanted to distribute physical items we designed. That was quite the headache as our first website was not designed to offer both digital and physical content. We decided that we had to work from scratch on another platform. This gave us the opportunity to consider every aspect of what we had to offer and think of something different in terms of graphic design, overall structure and user experience.
Now, Blaze Type has grown, we have to give you all both a fun and dynamic experience but yet something smooth enough for you to easily have access to the different parts of our website and enjoy it.
Over the years we received some emails of people having some issues finding their ways around trial fonts, student discount, the license system or even the whole buying process.
Blaze Type licensing models and fonts are meant to be easy to use and get around, our website has to reflect this.
We worked closely with Rezo Zero on the design in order to rework every negative or ‘so so’ aspect of our website and give you a smooth and enjoyable experience navigating it. The development was handled by Guido Ferreyra
The large font families are easier to navigate, the website as a whole is faster and we can finally show you the physical products we’ve been working on thanks to the amazing photography work of IGO Studio.
Of course, it’s not all about functionality! You’ll be able to witness some lovely graphic experiments all around the website.
Pretty much all the website makes a heavily use of Variable fonts in order for you to have a smoother, faster, experience navigating it. All our font families (with large styles/fonts) are now variable, so you’ll be able to test out the different axes of these typefaces directly in the font sampler!
There are tons of different ways to license fonts and it’s so complicated that at one point anyone can miss something in the EULA.
We always wanted to make our fonts easy to handle, hence the print/web/app broadcast licensing as a whole. The only thing you had to consider in our previous website was the amount of users you needed covered.
We made some changes regarding that, now when purchasing a font on Blaze Type the licensing system remains closely the same (you can use the fonts on anything you wish) but now, the license owner will have to pick a license for the amount of people in their company, not the amount of users (which is now unlimited regardless of the company size).
If you’re purchasing a font on behalf of a client (for a branding project for example), as they will be the license owner, you’ll have to select the amount of employees in their company.
Considering the ever evolving way for us to communicate, we have to now consider social media as a whole too. As such, you’ll have the option to choose if you are purchasing a license for any kind of social media uses as well. What will be considered here is the amount of followers across different social media platforms, this licensing system will start at < 10k followers up to unlimited. (Which means that if you are planing to use our fonts on anything shared on social media, you don't have to bother with this licensing if the amount of followers across your social networks doesn't go beyond 10K followers)
Student License (more about that below)
Company (with the possibility to pick the right amount of employees, starting from Freelance to Unlimited)
Social Media (with the possibility to pick the right amount of Followers —across all social media platforms combined— starting from 10K Followers to Unlimited).
If your Social Media use (for your personal use or for your client's) on all social media platforms do not extend over 10K followers you don't need to purchase a Social Media license: we include an Under 10K use automatically when you purchase a font as a Freelance, a Company sized or Student.
To make it simpler for students to access our fonts, instead of writing to us to get access to the promo code, you’ll be able to directly get your hands on it by following a quick step verification on our website.
The Student License allows you to use the fonts on personal, school or commercial projects. This license automatically turns into a "Freelance" license after your studies.
The Display Font Pack (23 fonts for 200€ (instead of 690€)*
The Text Font Pack (26 fonts: 200€ instead of 780€)*
The Starter Pack: Both of the packs (300€ instead of 1470€)*
These are made to give you a quick access to using our typefaces at a preferred price, an easy way to immediately jump in a sea of versatile fonts to design with while benefiting to our full licensing: use the fonts on anything you want.
(* This price lists is indicated for a Freelance sized company purchase, price may vary depending on your company size and amount of social followers)
We've also worked on two different set of main character set for the different kind of font families we offer. One is mainly focused on body text oriented font families (such as Area, Surt, Inferi, Joly…) with 838 different glyphs (minimum), large languages covering, small caps, and tons of alternates, circled letters/digits, etc. the other kind of character set (thought for display font families such as Emeritus, Armag, etc.) contains 581 different glyphs (minimum) with a large amount of alternate glyphs, circled letters/digits & so on.
You can have a look at those new addition directly in the Character Set of our font families, in each of our font page!
Amongst our different projects we focus on designing all our type families with a large set of styles fully variable.
The ones which are not yet fully variable are in the process of becoming so.
I don’t feel there’s a need to explain how incredible and useful VF are: I believe we’ve all seen quite enough designs using the full advantage of these in the previous years. Not only does Variable open up a whole new perspective in terms of font animation but it gives a super flexible range of utility to the users and well, VF are super light in terms of file weight.
I strongly believe this is the way to go for web fonts (especially) and we’ll keep on designing this way.
As such, our website takes advantage of this awesome technology, allowing a super fast and ever organic experience of our work. You’ll be able to witness these different features by navigating around the website!
We’ve had the opportunity & pleasure to work with amazing people on different type-related projects.
Whether they be mastering font project/logo, updating a font family with different styles, weights, languages or designing a custom either from one of our retail font's structure or from scratch we can (and have) work on pretty much anything type related!
We’ll now showcase some of these works directly on our website, it's always a nice opportunity for us to go back to the work and show you all more about our process!
You can see some case studies directly in our Article section (INSERT LINK) & the Custom area of our website!
We had such fun in designing this collection.
The idea was to think of the different items a sport supporter would wear. What would a type supporter outfit be?
We’ve teamed with Chloé Pays, Art Director/Graphic designer for the art direction and design of the various elements you will discover on our Products page (Hats, Shirts, Silk Scarfs & so on…).
As for the editorial content, we had the pleasure to work with IGO Studio and we couldn’t be more happier of the result.
Now that this work is finally out there we’re still not resting.
We’ll be expanding our activities with more fonts from various designers from all around the world. Especially young graduates and students who are looking for a place to release their first project. One might feel that a career in type design isn’t easy to start and maybe this way we can help out some people in doing so.
New font families are coming up, of course. We've been discussing with amazing designers and working with them on their project. We're very excited to be soon distributing the works of Valerio Monopoli, Alain Papazian, Siri Lee Lindskrog, Guillaume Sbalchiero, Hugo Jourdan, Arthur Schwarz, Laurène Girbal & we're working on a massive update of our famous Apoc family.
THANK YOU ALL
For reaching this far 👍 (it was quite a long read wasn't it?)
For supporting our work & passion
For being an awesome community to whom we relate and want to give back
Thank you.
