Mastodawn

After years of thinking about it, and a bit of time working on it, I'm super excited to announce a new version of https://type.lol/ 🔤

Now you can follow foundries, designers, and friends—collect typefaces, and explore them in entirely new ways. (Carousel, Grid, List, Graph, Globe)

Type.lol has evolved from a simple list into a full-on collection tool that bridges the gap between type exploration, discovery, and purchase—connecting foundries and designers more directly than ever.

My hope is that this helps build a new kind of marketplace where type designers earn more from their work, and designers can more easily find the perfect typefaces for their projects.

I can’t wait for you to try it out and let me know what you think!

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Bold Monday Feb 24

@mark Congrats! I appreciate the concept and effort that you put into it. But there are so many factual errors when I check our foundry, fonts, and designers I don’t know where to begin. Is your data based on AI?

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Mark Johnson Feb 25

@boldmonday Thanks and sorry haha. It's not perfect, but it's a start.

For context: I'm a single person working on this, so it’s hard to get ~20K entities and all their respective facts correct on the first go, so your reply and knowing what's wrong is helpful in figuring out how to get it right. Thank you!

tl;dr: Airtable Doc → Scraper → Claude → Type.lol

The data is a blend that comes from parsing site text through an LLM that tries to format the data to the correct data structure for type.lol to render it in a way that makes sense.

There's plenty of work left to do, but one way to make sure it's right is create an account, claim a profile, and edit your profile directly.

Otherwise it will still probably be a bit more finagling on my part to get things right.

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Mark Johnson

@boldmonday Also, It's possible many things have been scraped at various parts of the process, so the enrichment results might vary. My main goal was to try to get stuff in, and then enrich/have foundries/designers/users help identify what's wrong and what's right.

I’m really just trying to make a place for designers to browse, collect, share, and discover independently created type and ideally buy directly from foundries.

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Bold Monday Feb 25

@mark I totally understand and I appreciate you trying. It is hard to maintain a large collection of data. But hopefully this also illustrates what a lousy job scrapers + AI do. And how important human curation still is if you want your project to be trustworthy. We’re happy to help and we can supply an up-to-date list of all our releases with designer info. Just let me know.

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Mark Johnson Feb 25

@boldmonday That would be amazing, thank you! That's exactly the kind of collaboration I'm hoping for. Foundries supplying their own data is always going to be more accurate than any automated pipeline. The scraping + AI enrichment was really just a way to bootstrap the initial dataset working solo, not the end state. The whole point is to get to a place where foundries have direct control over how they're represented. If you create an account you can claim your profile for your foundry/designer entities and have edit access to make these changes.