Sometimes, it can take quite a while for a foundry to finally become sustainable. Sometimes, like in the case of James Edmondson, it can take 17 type families.
James Edmondson started Ohno in 2015, “born from a love of expressive typography and craft.” And, as he shares in a wonderful account of his life story, it took about 6 years until Degular came “like a bolt of lightning” to the library, immediately making the foundry sustainable. It certainly is one of the designs with more focus on practicality than expressiveness, but still you feel a bit of the playful and quirky design details that make other typefaces of the foundry so unique and give it its very own expressive visual style. Like Covik Sans, which started as James’ graduation project in TypeMedia in a effort to create something interesting and original. Or the even more expressive and charmingly bold display fonts like Beastly, Irregardless, or Blazeface. My personal highlight, Obviously, is a playful sans-serif that combines the charm of hand painted signage with impact of Impact. Unmistakable, confident, dense, wide, and with a delicious semislant in the variable font. If you want to learn more about each typeface, by the way, read the texts in the type specimens. ;) And if you want to test them, you can get free demo fonts with a limited character set.
Oh no! I almost forgot to mention that you can also get merch from Ohno and listen to fabulous conversations with people like Christian Schwarz, Lizy Gershenzon, and Travis Kochel on the Ohno Radio podcast.
And if you’re inspired now and want to learn more about type design, have a look at the Ohno Type School.
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This post is part of the Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar 2022
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