The Typosium Manifesto

[Choz Cunningham]

Welcome to Typosium. We are in the very early stages here! Hopefully this post is the first place you came too. The following is a work in progress, so expect changes as the community grows and responds.

What is the Typosium?


Typosium is intended to become the premier source of peer, critical and popular review of digital typefaces. At this time, there are many places to find commercial and free fonts. Some places even offer limited popularity information to help a user choose fonts, or discuss what makes a font great. Proposed here is an open forum where all this comes together at once. A place where everone may meet to recognize the best fonts and font families out there, and to educate each other on what makes them great.

Regardless of the price or use, Fonts are essentially software, and thus, products. Like any other product, the industry grows and advances when the user has access to excellent information, and when the industry recognizes its own best efforts. Typosium can become a center for both of those ideals. To create a broad point of view, Typosium must be a very open system, allowing hobbyists, graphic designers, vendors/foundries, type designers, font journalists and font producers to all comment, review and rate fonts alongside one another, while tailoring the information to suit the interests of each.

Releases offered for review should be completed works from creators and their vendors, identical to what available to the end user. To protect the interests of creative workers, Typophile will only allow as much access to a font as the submitter chooses. Permission to review and rate, however, must be as open and broad as possible. A consensus will only develop with the feedback of many users. In return, the users should maintain each other, through a system of kudos, earned privileges and moderation of each other's activities.

Soon, Typosium will become a catalog of all sorts of fonts, from commercial to public domain, from decorative to body-oriented, and a wealth of information on each.


Sound interesting? Then keep reading, join the Dept. of Planning, and help build the future of font sites!