What is Vanilla Type?

Birth of an Obsession.

Six Years ago I was newly married, which was the awesome, best time of my life. But on the horizon, just a few months away I was about to face a huuuge problem. Ya see I had $10,000 in credit card debt, and was about to move to New York city to go to school in a very intense program that left me with virtually no free time. So the problem was this. With no money and no time, how do I find a way to pay rent and buy groceries? And with the deadline of the start of school approaching you can imagine my anxiety increased day by day. But anxiety aside I got to planning. In an attempt to make ends meet I decided to go all in on designing and selling fonts. I figured I could make a bunch of them in the next few months, then before school started I could sell them and hopefully make enough to get by. Well I got by, just barely But that’s why im telling you this story and that is just where the story starts. Cuz while I was in grad school just getting by in the background I was falling in love with the craft of typeface design. And once I graduated and my time was freed up I became absolutely obsessed with designing typefaces.

When I say obsessed I mean I go to bed thinking about type design, dream about designing typefaces and wake up in the middle of the night get out my computer and start actually designing the typefaces I was dreaming about.

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Pretend Type School

Now that I had finished grad school (still in my rented apartment and not starving thankfully) I looked into formally studying typeface design. I wanted to learn from the best because I wanted to become one of the best. And despite the difficulties of supporting a family while in school and a growing student debt I loved being in an environment dedicated to learning.

I applied for what I considered to be the best type program in the world. and didn’t get in. So, I put my head down and decided for the next few years I was going to put myself through my own version of a type design masters program sans cohort sans mentors.

I learned everything I could. I studied typefaces I loved, I read books and I consumed absolutely everything there was to consume on the internet about typeface design. I definitely put in my 10,000 hours. To give you an idea In five years I designed over 40 typefaces with over 400 individual fonts. Each one I pushed the boundary of my ability with more features, more styles and higher standards in craftsmanship. I tried to touch every aspect of typeface from sans serifs, display fonts, scripts, and crazy open type features. I went wide looking under every rock I could find.

This obsession with mastering the craft of typeface design took a lot a lot a lot of time. But I was dedicated. So, in order to support myself. I continued creating and selling typefaces under the type foundry that that type. I wasn’t getting rich, I had to move away from New York City to a small town living in my in-laws basement.

Now let me say this: no man in the history of the planet earth has ever felt good about needing to move in with his inlaws, but I figured if that was the cost of mastering the craft I was happy to pay the price.

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Diving into Double Obsession

After a few years scrapping by head down drawing letters for hours and hours every day I found myself developing a sense of personal preference. I was leaving behind that wide shallow exploration I had been doing for years and started focusing more of my time, attention, and practice in one direction. I was already obsessed with typeface design but I became double obsessed with creating robust Variable Font Families.

Up until this point I had been releasing typeface on a pretty steady cadence of every two weeks,  or once a month. That was the backbone of That That Type. With my obsession of mastering typeface design I didn’t split my attention and do marketing and social media and all the things you should do if you want to run a successful business. I just came out with fonts often enough to keep an audience interested and priced them low enough to keep them buying.

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A Problem of Principles

But I was running into a problem. These Robust Variable Font Families that I was making took a lot longer than two weeks or a month to make. I work extremely fast, but even so It was impossible to keep up that model quickly, release low prices and make the typefaces I was dreaming about making. Something had to change.

But I didn’t want to change the core principles behind That That Type. I felt a kinship with this audience that had supported me though grad school and had helped me making a living where I could study typeface design so intensely for years. If I was only able to release a couple fonts a year and still make a living I was going to have to raise the price by four or five times and limit the websites where my fonts could be purchased. That Just didn’t feel right to me. To switch it up on to this audience that has rallied around accessible typefaces for years.

So I decided to leave That That Type as it was. More experimental typefaces at more accessible prices sold absolutely everywhere. And with that I decided to start a second type foundry with a different set of core principles But the question I kept asking myself was. What are those new core principles?

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Articulating Why

I knew what kind of typefaces I loved creating, but I had to really think about why I loved creating them. And I thought about it for a very long time. I think a lot of artists and designers go through this process. We know what we like to create but discovering and articulating why we like to create certain things in a certain way can be as difficult as mastering actual craft. But it was worth doing. I had been designing typefaces for years and years with no real conscious motivation other than it was what I loved spending my time designing typefaces.

At this point I was about four years into designing typefaces. I was starting to feel like I had some level of mastery over the craft, and I made what I considered to be my first well designed typeface. Also at this point I had just moved out of New York, was trying to figure out where my family could live on a few thousand dollars a month and I found myself staying in a little town in France called Brive-la-Gaillarde.

It was an old town with stone buildings that had been built centuries ago and still used today. The world had entirely changed around these buildings. Cars, airplanes, spaceships, the internet, yet these buildings, these stone walls remained when everything else changed. Those buildings impacted me deeply.

I wanted to make typefaces like those buildings. So well built and so beautiful they would be around for centuries. Even if everything changed. They would remain no waste, no clutter, not subject to trends, not chasing the new, Just enough build as they are.

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My Joy by Day, My Dream by Night

I also wanted to build a home for these typefaces backed by an ideology that hit me in the core like these Houses in Brive-la-Gaillarde. Something that I could spend a lifetime chasing and at the end of it all feel I had contributed real value. That is when the relationship of beauty and utility became more of a concrete thought. It became a filter through which I could run all my decisions. It became an ideology on which I could build a new foundry to restructure my practice of typeface design and distribute my craft to an audience of designers and brands who shared those values. I had found my why. Much like the process of typeface design, the name of the new Type Foudry came to me in a dream. Vanilla Type.

The Vanilla Type ideology can be summed up in this mantra.

Value Beauty, Value Utility, Never Sacrifice One for the Other.

All the decisions made around Vanilla Type are run through this filter. That resulted in this set of core principles

• Craft Typefaces That will be used often and always.
• Design using motifs that have stood the test of time.
• Keep Licensing Simple, With a Focus on Longevity.

Once the why was defined the mantra was set and the principles established I went to work.

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Vanilla Grotesque

For the past year I have been working on my most ambitious typeface yet. The First release from Vanilla Type. Vanilla Grotesque.

Vanilla Grotesque was carefully crafted after an extremely meticulous study of Grotesque and Neo Grotesque Typefaces that have outlasted the coming and going of trends and have stuck around for decades and in some cases over a century. And are still relevant. I looked at Helvetica, Neue Haas Grotesque, Akzedenz Grotesk and many more. I was ridiculously detail oriented and made lists of comparisons almost character to character. What did they have in common, what was different, and what did those differences communicate. After spending so much time with classic and contemporary typefaces in the grotesque camp I started to make my own design decisions. I kept some commonalities, I picked and chose elements from each typeface that resonated with me. In some cases I added features or created new motifs that I felt were missing from any of the typefaces. I kept the best parts of the best typefaces and did the rest according to my taste.

And I labored over the creation of this new typeface.

Special attention was given to creating Harmonious Curves, Smooth Transitions, and Elegant joining of strokes. A strict standard was kept for even color not only across each individual letter but from character to character, style to style and family to family. And Hours and Hours and Hours and Hours were spent spacing the typeface to dial in the perfect rhythm and tempo for attention grabbing headlines in display, easy reading in body copy in text, and careful inspection of code in mono.

That is the Beauty side of things. As far as utility goes Vanilla Grotesque is a Variable Font Super Family that includes 3 subfamilies; Display with 162 styles, Text with 20 styles, and Mono with 10 styles for a total of 192 styles.Vanilla Grotesque also has a treasure trove of open type features. Case sensitive punctuation, Small caps, Superscript characters, old style numbers fifteen different style sets including 4 lowercase a’s circle numbers. Variable axes for width weight and italic angle. The list goes on.

But the Value Beauty, Value Utility Mantra doesn't just stop at the typefaces it runs through every part of vanilla Type.

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Cover Everything, Last Forever

Like I said before, licensing should be simple and focused on longevity. That is why Vanilla offers only two licenses by default. A free trial license and an all in one commercial license

The free rail license is for testing, student work, portfolio work, and personal social media pages. The trail fonts include the entire character set and all of the open type features. No holding back.

I remember being a young designer trying to put together a portfolio to get a design job and not being able to use well designed typefaces because I had no money to buy them because I had no job. And I just remember thinking how will this cycle ever end?

The Vanilla Type Commercial license is an all in one license. It covers print, digital images, packaging, web use, app use, even broadcasting and advertising. And the pricing is simple: The price of the license is based strictly on company size. So purchasing and upgrading are extremely simple, no need to track metrics like follower count users and page views. Vanilla Type Commercial license is all good for forever. It only makes sense because Vanilla fonts are meant to be used forever.If you as a brand owner or a designer shouldn’t be worrying about the legal nuances of the fonts you are using. That worry takes up space. It takes up energy that would be better used mastering your craft. And selfishly on my end, I don’t have to spend time chasing invoices and making sure my fonts are being used correctly. Like you would rather spend time mastering my craft. Making beautiful typefaces.

Remember. Value Beauty, Value Utility, Never Sacrifice one for the other.

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Thanks for Reading, Now go Make Something