Studio Typeface Releases

I produced digital type specimens for both new studio releases and library classics for evaluation and inspiration by customers based on comprehensive user research and testing.

Overview

The company behind type

Monotype is a type foundry and home to one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of typefaces. It owns historically significant typefaces such as Helvetica and Gill Sans. It is also home to a talented Studio team who are working on producing new contemporary fonts like Masqualero, Posterama and Macklin. They also work on huge projects over many years to release reimagined classics like Helvetica Now and Fruitiger Now.

I joined the company after the design studio I worked for was acquired to form the company’s in-house digital design team in 2014.

The challenge

Inspiration and evaluation

As a foundry, a large part of Monotype’s business is releasing, promoting and selling typefaces. However, typefaces take years of expertise and development to create and are, therefore, rightly, quite expensive. This means the designers and brands who look to purchase a typeface for their project are not making impulse purchases and need to have the facilities to evaluate the font and ensure it meets their needs. Monotype had a few digital specimens, but they were bespoke projects which required external agency input, large budgets and generous timescales.

The audience

Freelancers to global companies

Typefaces tend to be purchased by designers completing work on behalf of their clients. Fundamentally though the type specimen would be interacted with by a single designer looking for evidence that a font would either work for a logomark or have the correct breadth for full corporate usage. These users are usually in the midst of their creative process and want to be inspired as well as informed.

My role

I worked as a lead designer alongside the UX team, assisted in user research interviews with the Research Director and with the Monotype Fonts product team to align specimen design across products.

How we got there

Research and redesign

As we had such a potentially wide audience we split the research tasks across the team. Freelance and smaller agency designers were interviewed remotely on video calls. I was lucky to fly to New York with our Research Director and help undertake a series of incredibly interesting interviews with some of our larger clients. These included Penguin Books, Saatchi & Saatchi, Mastercard and Scholastic. We wanted to discover how they undertook typeface discovery and decision making at such a large scale. We conducted group interviews, recorded insights and then used our findings alongside the rest of the research to inform how we ordered and structured the components on the specimen page.

Once we had constructed a page that we knew would answer the questions we had discovered designers asked of a typeface when considering it for a project, we did rounds of user testing to gauge the response before we moved onto the marketing portion of the specimen. Then once we were happy we worked with a contractor to ensure a specimen could be spun up easily and with a consistent structure whenever required.

I then lead the marketing component of releasing a new digital type specimen for not only all the Monotype Studio releases up to the end of 2020, but I also went back through the back catalogue and created specimens for the historical typefaces in the Monotype library that data showed were searched for the most.

The final aspect to this work occurred in 2020 when the UX team decided that we should have as much cohesion between all our products as possible. I worked with Jamie Neely, the Director of Product Design to ensure that specimens on both Monotype Fonts and Monotype.com had a consistent UI and UX. Not only would this help users move between products, but it was also quicker and more efficient for the company.

Outcomes and lessons

Deciding on typefaces, digitally

The outcome of this work was that the company from 2015 was able to create a digital specimen page, in house, alongside the other supporting marketing materials. I was able to work with all the other parts of the company to ensure that everything was delivered on time for the launch and that the whole campaign was cohesive. The specimens were linked in any digital marketing and mentioned in printed marketing. The launch of the typeface Helvetica Now was a particular highlight and the type specimen remains one of the most visited pages of the website.