UPDATE: Well, life got in the way shortly before the project started and some dates have been pushed, but the goal of releasing 22 fonts is still there. Who doesn’t like a nice challenge?
At the beginning of 2022 and after a few months of consideration while running Seabell Studio, I decided to launch my own type foundry to move my small font catalog to its own site. Thus, the idea of Seabell Type Foundry was born. In the previous crazy months prior to the official launch (due in June 2022), I started a refresh of the font catalog. That opened the Pandora Box of typography, and started studying and reading typography full-time while practicing my typographic drawing skills and the never ending spacing and kerning learning. At some point I decided that I needed more practice before even releasing some of the new typefaces I was working on. The Dunning-Kruger Effect had kicked in so hard!
Looking for type projects I found Pyte Foundry and the majestic crazy project by the same name by Stefan Ellmer. It’s a one-font-every-fricking-week project, a titanic endeavour that looked out of this planet. How can one individual craft 52 fonts in a single year? So crazy. More browsing were involved to find a good motivation to keep improving on my skills and widen my knowledge. Deep inside I wanted to emulate that, so in May 6, I decided to sketch a website, write some text and start figuring out how to release a bunch of typefaces as a public practice.
A new font is released on the 10th, 20th and 30th of each month, starting May 20, 2022 and will be available to download for free during a 10-days-period. Grab it while it’s there because once it’s gone, it’s gone!*
| No. | Date | Font Name |
|---|---|---|
| No.01 | May 20 | STF Helenick |
| No.02 | May 30 | STF Minera |
| No.03 | Jun 10 | STF Artique |
| No.04 | Jun 20 | STF Charkley |
| No.05 | Jun 30 | STF Waicena Sans + Serif |
| No.06 | Jul 10 | STF Sweller Sharp + Round |
| No.07 | Jul 20 | STF Cassidy |
| No.08 | Jul 30 | STF Wadlow |
| No.09 | Aug 10 | STF Broq |
| No.10 | Aug 20 | STF Julita |
| No.11 | Aug 30 | STF Yunque |
| No.12 | Sep 10 | STF Cassidy Sans |
| No.13 | Nov 10 | STF Muriatic |
| No.14 | Jun 08 | STF Fragmenta |
| No.15 | Jun 20 | ? |
| No.16 | Soon | ? |
| No.17 | Soon | ? |
| No.18 | Soon | ? |
| No.19 | Soon | ? |
| No.20 | Soon | ? |
| No.21 | Soon | ? |
| No.22 | Soon | ? |
*Well, there’s the supporting thing.
If you missed one font –or all of them– you can get them through a small donation. This little gesture will help me to keep creating fonts so I can finish the project, let’s say by buying food to keep me alive or paying some bills (damn power!). If you’re generous enough, let’s say something in the thousands, I’ll get a new computer and will send you a printed picture of my fat cat as a thank you. Anyway, once the donation is made you’ll receive a link to download all of the released fonts in a good old zip file.
Don’t worry about your business size, or the number of computers! The fonts are released under an easy-going license that lets you use the fonts for personal or commercial projects, client presentations, websites, ebooks, apps, you name it. That easy.
You can read the License here
The initial idea is to keep the fonts simple glyphs-wise, but if you fall in love with any of the fonts and the character set is not enough for your needs –i.e. lowercase, more diacritics or symbols– let’s chat about it. I’m pretty sure we can find a good solution by creating a tailored character set or even a full family out of our beloved free font.
Given the nature of the project, in most cases the character set will include (but not limited to):
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Á Â Ä À Å Ã Æ Ç Ð É Ê Ë È Í Î Ï Ì Ñ Ó Ô Ö Ò Õ Ø Œ Þ Ú Û Ü Ù Ẃ Ŵ Ẅ Ẁ Ý Ŷ Ÿ Ỳ
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
. , : ; - – — ¡ ! ¿ ? ( ) & * /
The download includes .OTF and .WOFF/.WOFF2 so you’re covered for desktop and web usage.
Fonts are to be used, so please let me know if you used any of them in a project, I’d love to see what you create! Don’t hesitate to contact me through email, on Twitter or Instagram.
My email is fran @ seabell • studio.
Being realistic, I could make 15-20 fonts with a limited character set. The two main reasons being that I don’t want to spend weeks and weeks adding characters, spacing, kerning… the same font and that I can’t give away hours of work for free releasing fully functional fonts. After all I only want to get better at this to offer better fonts at Seabell Foundry. As the year is 2022, I settled at twenty two fonts.
Any good project needs a name and this was an easy one. Twenty Two on Twenty Two was a little long, so I decided to call it simply 22/22. Twenty two fonts in Twenty Twenty Two. Done. Next.
OK, here’s the deal: I give you the fonts, you make awesome stuff. And basically that’s it. Commercial, personal, on a web or an ebook, for your business cards or your uncle’s repair shop.
There’s only one download link that gets you the latest font. Once a new font is uploaded the linked content is updated, so I don’t have to worry about the files or whatever. And more importantly, once a new font is available, previous ones will be gone. Forever gone? Well, that’s the deal, you try to get them all, as they were Pokemons. “So there’s no way to get past fonts that I missed?” Well, since you ask, there’s one way.
To my wife C for the never ending support at all levels. I love you so much!
To Stefan Ellmer for the inspiration both on type and perseverance. To Brandon Nickerson for constantly putting out amazing free fonts. To Viktor Baltus for being such a great knowledge source. To online libraries for making old type specimens available to everyone. To all typographers from all eras for the unlimited amount of amazing work.
I certainly am standing on the shouders of giants!!
Site running on Jekyll, written on Sublime Text. Hosted on Github and deployed by Netlify. Texts set in SB Planck Sans by Seabell Type Foundry, to be released. Fonts created on Glyphs and Fontself. Donations available through Gumroad.