Font Proofer creator Peter Nowell moderates.
Type design tools—and other resources serving our small community—are rarely sustainable long-term projects for the people who make them. Whether it’s an app, plugin, script, or website, we’ve all experienced a project get abandoned, which has real impacts on type designers. As toolmakers and as a community, we can improve this!
Join the people behind Glyphs, Fontdue, Words of Type, and Font Proofer for a thought-provoking conversation on the challenges and strategies we can all learn from.
Because the type design community is too small (and underpaid!) to be a profitable market for large companies, most tools and community projects are made by passionate individuals or foundries solving short-term needs. But while love and excitement can spark a project, they aren’t enough to sustain it for years.
What happens to our ecosystem when a toolmaker can’t continue?
Sustainability is the key—but there are no easy answers. Nor is it all about money. Some creators are already experimenting with new strategies, and this conversation will explore what we can do to make our ecosystem more resilient, self-sufficient, and thriving.
Lisa Huang is a French and Chinese typeface designer specializing in Latin and Hanzi scripts currently based in Nantes, France.
Born in France with Chinese roots, she grew up with two cultures simultaneously in the cosmopolitan environment of Paris and found out the many differences and similarities between French and Chinese ways of life. As a designer today, her practice of typography and typeface design reflects her life experience while keeping a high consideration and comprehension of both writing systems to better connect them.
After graduating with a Master’s degree in Art Direction in Paris, she pursued a specialization in Type Design at Type@Cooper followed by a Master’s degree at TypeMedia in The Hague. Lisa has experience practicing as a freelance designer and in-house art director, working for clients of various sizes and industries, local and international. Eventually, she settled in as an independent designer, to dedicate more time and freedom to activities related to typography along with her design practice, such as workshops, lectures, teaching, and consulting in type design between Latin and Hanzi scripts, shared in English, French, and Chinese.
Since 2023, she is working on Words of Type, a multilingual encyclopedia of typographic terms.
Peter Nowell is a multi-disciplinary designer and the creator of Font Proofer. His work spans type design, UI/UX, web development, and branding. As an educator, Peter’s online courses and workshops have trained thousands of designers worldwide in technical topics like Sketch, SVG, and Python scripting for type design. He has been recognized by the D&AD Awards, the W3 Awards, and the Type Directors Club.
Peter is passionate about building tools that empower creatives.
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer was born in Vienna, and studied photography, philosophy, and Dutch. Today, he creates and produces typefaces, teaches type design, gives type design workshops, translates Dutch books on typography into German, and writes articles and Python scripts. Rainer joined the Glyphs team in 2012, and has been writing tutorials and the handbook. In 2014, he started the foundry Schriftlabor.
Tom Conroy is a software engineer with eighteen-plus years of experience building for the web and a multimedia and type design background. In 2018, he founded Fontdue, the ecommerce platform that supports over 100 independent type foundries. Tom previously worked for Hoefler & Co. as a web developer and First Look Media, where he helped develop a platform for news and media websites.
Lisa Huang 
Peter Nowell 
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer 
Tom Conroy