Commercial Type is a custom type design studio founded in 2007 by Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz, based in New York City and London. They have worked to build a growing library of excellent quality with “a balance between highly versatile ‘vanilla’ typefaces that can do whatever a designer needs, and expressive typefaces that allow a designer to sit back and let the typeface do the hard work of making a piece of design interesting and memorable.”
Paul and Christian both have a background in publication design and had already collaborated on the type system for the newspaper The Guardian. So, when they founded Commercial Type, the Guardian Collection became the cornerstone and most successful set of typefaces of their library.
Other popular typefaces include sans-serif workhorses like the clear and optimistic Atlas and the plain but friendly Graphik, but also more expressive, characterful designs like Action Text, Druk, Original Sans, or Canela. Make sure to also have a look at Commercial Classics, their library of typefaces based on classic designs from typographic history.
Both designers have also collaborated with other foundries like Font Bureau, FontFont, or House Industries, with one notable release being Neue Haas Grotesk, a revival of Max Miedinger’s original Helvetica, which Commercial Type published in collaboration with Linotype in 2011.
Just like it is the case for all foundries features in this advent calendar, Commercial Type’s fonts are available as web fonts for self-hosting and you can get trial fonts as well.
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This post is part of the Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar 2022
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