Mastodawn

Daniel Utz Feb 25

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!

Mark Johnson Feb 17

While I'd say there's a lot here, there's plenty more work to be done, but I'm excited to share where it's at so far and hear what you're hoping to see next!

Colin M. Ford Feb 18

@mark I need to be able to link to my typo.social account in the "Ext. Links" section of my account :)

Mark Johnson Feb 18

@colinmford I'm on it! Gonna be working late tonight on a lot of profile editing and admin stuff :) I'll let you know when some goodies ship, hopefully tonight or early tomorrow morning.

crc.studio Feb 23

@mark Thank you very much. This is a huge addition.
I don’t even have the words in English to say how amazing it is. 🙏

Do you think it would be possible to add a direct link to Fonts In Use?

They use a redirect system, for example:
https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/gt-flexa
which automatically redirects to:
https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/112750/gt-flexa

GT Flexa in use

Comes in seven widths from X Compressed to X Expanded, plus a monospaced variant, each in seven weights from Lazer to Black, in roman and italic styles.

Fonts In Use

Mark Johnson Feb 23

@crcstudio Thank you so much! I'm glad you're enjoying it!

That's a great idea! I’m sure it is possible, I'll probably just need to re-enrich our typeface data to add that kind of thing and give some controls as well.

I'll add that to my roadmap and see if I can ship something tonight or sometime this week otherwise!

Mark Johnson Feb 25

@crcstudio there should be connections to Fonts in Use for many of the entities there now! If any are off or not working please let me know and I’ll can re-run my scraper thing to try to resolve them :)

crc.studio Feb 25

@mark I don’t think I’ve ever jumped so fast after seeing a notification.
Seeing nothing, I rushed to my computer and I still can’t find any link…

Is it just me?
Do I need an account?

In any case, thank you very much for doing this so quickly!

Mark Johnson Feb 25

@crcstudio Sorry jumped the gun! I thought my script ran on all things, but it only did some, it'll be more time. You can set it up in your account by modifying/editing your profile though, and that will work!

crc.studio Feb 26

@mark type.lol now has a new user 😉
https://type.lol/u/crcstudio

I still don’t see automatic Fonts In Use links, maybe I’m missing them. No rush, I know you’re busy.

When you have time, I have ideas to improve type.lol and some data errors to flag. How’s best to send feedback?

Type.lol - Independent Type Foundry Index

Discover and explore independent type foundries from around the world. Browse 830+ foundries, preview their websites, and find your next favorite typeface.

Mark Johnson Feb 26

@crcstudio Huzzah! Yay! Top left there's a settings cog, and in that is a feedback thing for feedback info, or "submit" for submitting a new foundry/typeface/designer. Either of those would be lovely!

crc.studio Feb 26

@mark Thanks! Get ready to receive a few tickets 😅

Mark Johnson Feb 26

@crcstudio honestly can not wait!

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?

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.

Mark Johnson Feb 25

@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.

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.

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.

Mark Johnson Feb 25

@boldmonday Also looking into Bold Monday in particular, extra sorry! It looks like this came from my earliest scraping attempt so the enrichment was really off/bad! So sorry about that! Running a new batch of fixes on Bold Monday, then passing through others afterwards.