Process

HelloFresh is a delivery service that saves you time on shopping and meal planning – you pick recipes and they send a box full of pre-measured ingredients that you cook at home. It’s one of many such services popping up left and right. In this growing market, where websites replace store aisles, each brand’s take on photography, colors, and type will be key to luring in cooks.

The approach of HelloFresh is a bright orange and green color palette combined with Alice Savoie’s Capucine. Her typeface is used primarily for headings and its rich flavor is balanced by a generous amount of white space. Capucine’s distinct italics are also put to good use, adding a layer of hierarchy and a subtle sense of movement to the page.

The design carries over to their iOS app, where you can see recipes and rate meals. Paired with Adobe’s Source Sans, Capucine is used more extensively and at a wider range of sizes. The typefaces complement each other, creating a bright vibe and easy-to-follow instructions. Overall, the use of Capucine lends warmth to an experience that could easily feel cold.

Capucine is available for desktop and webfont formats, and has extended licensing options.

There’s a new way to test our typefaces, and not just that – you can rent them too. Fontstand, a desktop Mac application, lets you try fonts for free for one hour as well as rent them on a monthly basis at 10% of the normal license cost. Whether you rent or trial, the chosen fonts work right away in your design apps without you having to install them. At launch, Fontstand offers hundreds of typefaces from over twenty independent foundries.

Clicking a ‘buy’ button isn’t always easy. Maybe you need to test the fonts before committing, maybe you want to make sure the client approves, or maybe you’re a design student on a tight budget. We get that – we’ve been there – and we think Fontstand can help. This new approach to licensing is a great way to get your hands on high-quality typefaces and ensure that you’re using the right font for the job. You can think of renting as an extensive test or as a way to use fonts for a limited time – you can always rent the fonts again when you revisit a project – and once you rent for twelve total months, the fonts are yours to download.

To get started with Fontstand, visit fontstand.com. And the links below will take you directly to the fonts we currently offer. If there are any typefaces you’d love to see on Fontstand, send us an email or tweet.

Process on Fontstand:

• Capucine
• Colfax
• Elena
• Scandia
• Scandia Line

If you happened by the FontFeed recently, you’ll find an interview with Process Type Foundry partners Eric Olson and Nicole Dotin by Yves Peters. Go ahead, read the words. Sometimes, though, we just want to ogle the pictures. Here are photos from the interview along with extended annotations, outtakes and some extras.

Eric and Nicole standing in the doorway of the Process Type Foundry studio.

At some point, our photo shoot started to sour after taking shot after shot. There was nothing left to do but lighten the mood. Obviously, Eric grabbed a house number designed by Erik Spiekermann and placed it where it belonged.


This is Charlie, the silent third partner of Process, in the studio along with Bob Dylan, an old Mac Cube, our record player and various drawings by 3-year-olds.

After posing for his photo, Charlie popped by Nicole’s desk to see what she was working on and offer insight. Or, he might have been looking for a treat.

Designed and published by Ryan and Tina Essmaker, The Great Discontent features various weights of Stratum 1 alongside body text set in FontFont’s Meta Serif. More importantly, it features interviews with the makers of today.

“Do you guys know that thing that Ira Glass talks about? Where you start out and you know your taste is really good, but your ability needs to catch up to that taste?” An interview with Olga Bell on The Great Discontent.


Bryant and yellow belong together. This bag was one part of a larger rebrand of Raffles, a design school based in Sydney, Australia. Find more of the identity using Bryant on the Naughtyfish website, the firm that handled the redesign.


A test print for Elena Italic. Most of Nicole’s test prints are marked up in colored pen. Red, pink, blue and green are favorite colors for making messy, almost indecipherable notes for later decryption and then correction. The arm of the k needs … finesse.

Elena found its way into Instapaper, a popular app by Marco Arment for collecting and saving content to read later. If you happen to click on the link above for Marco, notice his personal site is set in Elena too (at the time of posting).


It’s no secret we love seeing our fonts in use and used well. It is a secret however, that we hope to one day see every font in our library used in a single magazine. As far as we know, Seattle Met is the front-runner in our imagined competition. Capucine, Anchor, Bryant, Bryant Compressed and Colfax have all graced the magazine since design director André Mora took the helm. Only 13 more fonts to go, Mr. Mora.

During the summer of 2010, we jumped into the seemingly rarefied world of print and made a limited-edition poster celebrating Anchor (long since sold out). Designed by Abi Chase, it was a three-color screenprint featuring an unusually pastel palette when compared to our typical propensity towards CMYK.


And last but not least, a random bonus. >Wants for Sale was started in July of 2007 by Christine and Justin Gignac. A couple of months later, they took the same basic concept and started Needs for Sale. The concept? The couple paints pictures of needs, anything from basic necessities like food or shelter to research for curing diseases. The paintings are offered for purchase and 100% of the sale is donated to a charity whose mission it is to meet that need.

Anchor is used for all headlines and titling.

A nice way to end, right?

It’s 2012 already but before we say goodbye to 2011 entirely, there were tidbits from the last 365 we don’t want to forget. And while we’re at it, we’ve included a preview of typefaces slated for release in the New Year.

Seravek in iBooks
The 1.5 update to Apple’s iBooks app included several new typefaces, our Seravek among them. Of the seven type choices within the app, Seravek is the only sans serif.

Read more about the new fonts in iBooks:
Apple Updates iBooks App with Nighttime Reading Theme, New Fonts, More on MacRumors
Version 1.5 Improves Typography in iBooks on iPad and iPhone on the FontFeed
FontSwap in iBooks on BoingBoing

Anchor at the Walker Art Center
Like MoMA’s acquisition of several typefaces last year, the exhibition Graphic Design: Now in Production currently on view at the Walker Art Center highlights typefaces as significant cultural artifacts in their own right. Anchor was featured among a number of other typefaces as further evidence of the emerging role of designers as producers.

Five Long Years
After five years of tweaking, polishing and refining, we finally pressed the launch button on Nicole’s typeface Elena. Up next for Nicole? A display font loosely inspired by the rhythms of the brush marker.

1% for the Planet
As members of 1% for the Planet, we donate one percent of our yearly sales to non-profit organizations working to improve the environment. This year we lent our support primarily to local organizations like the Will Steger Foundation, the Midtown Greenway Coalition, Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness and the Sibley Bike Depot. Our one non-local exception was the Washington-based Sea Shepherd.

One year on: Webfonts and Capucine
October 6 of 2010 marked the launch of our webfonts program making 2011 our first full year with webfonts on offer. And the report so far? Roughly 38% of fonts purchased on our site were either webfonts or webfont/desktop combinations.

Alice’s typeface Capucine also celebrated its first year post-release. We were delighted to see it featured in the inaugural issue of Codex. Of course, seeing it used for what Alice originally intended – as a typeface for magazine listings – in the November issue of Seattle Met also made our list of wonderful things.

Henry B. Weimelt
We were surprised to learn this year that Eric’s great grandfather, Henry B. Weimelt, was a passionate letter maker when not working his shift at the local Post Office. For years, relatives told tales of his after-hours letter work but it wasn’t until this year that his collection of hundreds – if not thousands – of handcrafted letters were uncovered and gifted to Eric. After sorting through the collection though, Henry’s intentions remain a mystery. What were the letters used for? Why did he make them? We’ve posted one half of one small box on our Flickr account.

On Deck for 2012
And last but not least, a good deal of 2011 was spent focusing on releases for 2012. In the New Year Eric will release his 12-font family Chrono followed by the boisterous display companion to Klavika, Klavika Display.

2012 also marks our ten-year anniversary. Thank you for ten wonderful years (officially in June) and here’s to ten more. All our best in this new year!

Seattle Met, a magazine covering the local scene in Seattle, WA, has been using Anchor and Bryant Compressed since May, when designer André Mora came on board. But it was for the summery July issue, with its focus on farms, foraging and other foodie adventures that Mora paired Anchor with the agile Capucine, named after the French word for the Nasturtium flower.

As the newest addition to our family of typefaces, it’s great to see Capucine being put to use here in a way that showcases its flexibility, from display headlines to captions.

Although Capucine defies traditional categorization, it sits in a genre we are drawn to as users of type: a face with distinct personality able to straddle the worlds of both text and display with ease. In this context it should come as no surprise that its designer was born and raised in France, a country whose type history is rich with successful instances of such attempts. From Auriol and Grasset – typefaces that became symbolic of the Art Nouveau style – to the iconic designs of Roger Excoffon in the 1950s and 60s, French type designers have often tried to fulfill the requirements of efficient text setting while retaining a gestural quality. Like many of its French predecessors, Capucine is driven by the eye rather than geometrical dogma, bringing a warmth and liveliness to the page.

When Alice Savoie began designing Capucine in 2006, she set out to create a typeface specifically for magazine and newspaper listings. Fortunately, the demands of that potentially stifling area didn’t get in the way of what would ultimately be an expression of joie de vivre. Capucine is a robust family of ten styles, ranging from Thin to Black, whose flavor mixes the fluidity of writing with the vivacity of a brush script to create this idiosyncratic sans serif.

As a family, the weights and styles were designed to provide typographic contrast and variation. The two extremes – Thin and Black – were conceived as display variants while the mid-weights – Light, Regular and Bold – were designed for text sizes and to add hierarchical differentiation. When you first encounter Capucine, its use as a display face is evident. However, because it is slightly condensed, has a large x-height, small ascenders & descenders and wide counters, it is efficient for body text and remains legible even at small sizes. Additionally, the family features small caps, multiple numeral styles and case-sensitive punctuation for increased usefulness.

Adding to the typographic variation of Capucine is the italic. Despite its moderate angle, the pronounced contrast between thicks and thins, the exaggerated curves and a slight condensation of letter width provide the necessary contrast while remaining perfectly in sync with its roman counterpart. Set the italic at larger sizes, however, and it reveals itself as an independent design in its own right.

And for those who wonder, the name Capucine (pronounced KA-poo-seen) is not a reference to the delicious Italian mixture of coffee and foamed milk or even the French preference for strong coffees. Rather, the name is the French word for the nasturtium flower – deemed appropriate here because of the organic nature of the Capucine family.