Happy Birthday, FontStruct!

On April 1st 2008, FontShop launched a free, online platform for building modular fonts called FontStruct. Over the intervening two years a community of over 270,000 typographic bricklayers has come together to create, share, download and discuss almost 260,000 modular type designs. Thanks to all of you for participating in this fantastic project so far.

Coming Soon

We want FontStruct to continue improving by adding new features and creative possibilities, and we’re currently preparing a significant update to the FontStructor font editor. We hope to release this update at some point this month.

The Wall

To provide some entertainment in the meantime, we’re releasing a new, fun way to experience the amazing diversity of FontStructions: The Wall. This is an experimental project, so please be patient, particularly while the wall is preparing itself, and forgive the occasional glitch and eccentricity. Before anyone asks, you can’t feed in custom text to the Wall at the moment – we’re not sure how our servers are going to react to the load – but I can. The header image above is only a fragment, so I recommend you go over to FontStruct to see a little celebratory mosaic of 2s in full.

Ready … Set … FontStruct!

And the fun just doesn’t stop. Last month FontStruct launched its first competition. In the spirit of Olympic world-wide fellowship the challenge was to create the best sports themed FontStruction. To enter, FontStructors had to design and publish a new FontStruction that played into the world of sports, athletics and competition. The judging team consisted of FontStruct alumni and FontShop heavyweights: John Skelton, Stephen Coles, Gustavo Ferreira, Ivan Bettger, and myself. The task of judging was made increasingly difficult by the great turnout of FontStructors. In the end we had 24 FontStuctors who created 44 one-of-a-kind entries in just two short weeks. People produced some incredible and diverse work and every entry needed to be looked at in detail in order to try and make a fair judgement.

John Skelton – also known as afrojet on FontStruct – who set up the competition, concluded he needed a bigger podium:

The first-ever FontStruct competition is a wrap and we, the FontStruct staff, think it was a huge success. Thanks to everyone who played, commented, cheered, favorited and judged. Everyone came together in the spirit of play to produce some outstanding results.

Tags: FontStruct, modular, type design