Lost and foundry

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 | By Emily Gosling

After eight months in the making, Cure Studio has finally launched its type foundry, showcasing the work of some brilliant illustrators and typographers.

The project started when Haniboi created the Studio Rock typeface for a project to make a promotional bag. Having had no success at getting the typeface used on the bag into other type foundries, Cure Studio decided to launch its own.

Haniboi’s typeface was soon joined by Rose Stallard’s Rock. The typeface uses rock ‘n’ roll icons to denote each glyph, with Kurt Cobain, Bob Marley and Elvis among the signifiers.

James Hurst, Cure Studio director, says, ‘We were going to resell those two typefaces, but when more and more people heard we were launching a foundry they sent them over. As we got closer to the launch date we went through and looked everywhere - at blogs and things - and saw that type had been the focus of a lot of blogs.’

Now, the foundry features 18 typefaces from 14 different designers. It’s hoped that a new typeface will be added roughly once a week.

Hurst says, ‘We wanted them all to be new and interesting, or of the particular style of the illustrator or artists. One of the things we’re keen to do is that we don’t want to limit it to typefaces that work as type, so we set it up in a way that means there are also illustrator files that are too complicated to act as “workhorse” typefaces.’

We love Oli Frape’s cute Welco typeface; and Jack Featherstone, who designs the artwork for Warm record label and management company, has created the elegant Delphon.

Hurst says that they’re hoping for submissions from across the spectrum - from graphic designers, illustrators, architects and product designers. ‘We’ll do the heavy lifting’, he says. ‘If they don’t know how to turn their drawing into a typeface we can do that for them.’

For more information visit http://www.thetypefoundry.com/