Type Design Communities

Fontfruits
Fontfruits Posts: 51
in Resources
Being a little on the old side, and mostly had my head in the font making process above most things,  I've only just realized there are communities on a place called Reddit and 'Slack' that have all sorts of like-minded people in little communities. Anyone know if there are any little groups for Type designers? I don't really even know how to search them :/ Or at least my attempted searches have been fruitless. The only one of value I've found is TypeDrawers, but keen to know if there might be more out there that I haven't stumbled across. I know of Typography.guru - but seems to be more font users than makers there - or at least thats how it seemed. 
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  • Oliver Weiss (Walden Font Co.)
    Oliver Weiss (Walden Font Co.) Posts: 213
    edited January 2022
    https://www.typography.guru has a more active German language counterpart, https://www.typografie.info/
  • Fontfruits
    Fontfruits Posts: 51
    Thank you @Ray Larabie - gosh thank you for all the links - and taking the time to put them all there for me!! I'll be checking them all out :)  @Matthijs Herzberg - Agreed - it's nice to be able to skip all the more basic questions. I never thought of twitter - again - I only use it to look up latest news - but clearly I havn't been using it to it's full advantage. Thanks @Oliver Weiss (Walden Font Co.) - I havn't tried typographie.info - I'll check that out! 
  • Mike Duggan
    Mike Duggan Posts: 239
    Twitter is a good place to follow along with all the type designers, useful info, gossip, humor, the odd fight, etc :) 
  • Marc Oxborrow
    Marc Oxborrow Posts: 220
    edited January 2022
    No such collection could hope to be comprehensive, but here's my "Type & Design" list on Twitter. It's heavy on foundries and individual type designers.
  • AbiRasheed
    AbiRasheed Posts: 238
    edited January 2022
    Ray Larabie said:
    There's a lot of misunderstanding what the term typography means but there are occasionally useful posts on this sub. r/typography

    There is no misunderstanding. Given the history of the sub at one point, it allowed all type related posts even lettering. But because lettering was taking over typography posts they had to change rules. These days it only allows typography or typedesign or glyph design(questionable). Lettering posts get removed.


    While I agree with some of you with regards to reddit, you're underestimating the sheer power of 200,000 users subscribed there. Majority of users might be laymen or beginners but of the 200,000 there's gotta be professionals that most likely idle than offer critique and some do occasionally, some of you in here are there too. But more importantly reddit's type subs offer encouragement, typedrawers doesn't. Typedrawers is an amazing wealth of knowledge coming from industry giants and thats why reddit's r/typography has it on the sidebar but typedrawers has nothing to encourage in the form of an upvote or the equivalent. Reddit does.  So if you're new to typedesign, reddit does encourage you and you can gauge that using upvotes, the upvotes may not be entirely accurate but you kinda get the gist of how bad or good it is. I say this because my entire career in type and lettering stems from reddit and how they were encouraging since the get go. Having said that I find critique from complete strangers sometimes eye opening because they dont see type like we do day in day out. It is a perspective we must use to our advantage and welcome it. 
  • Justin Penner
    Justin Penner Posts: 65
    Ray Larabie said:
    This is where type designers post announcements of new releases. This sub is rife with font ID requests and pirate requests, even though it's forbidden. r/fonts
    Give r/fonts another chance! I recently became a moderator there and have been cleaning up the font ID and piracy requests. I've never been a Reddit moderator before; I was just getting tired of the lack of moderation in r/fonts and offered to help (since I'm usually on Reddit most days), so they made me a mod. As others have said, many posts are from beginners but I enjoy answering questions from people at all levels.

    I think Twitter and TypeDrawers are the two most active online communities for type designers, though. You can find fifteen lists of type designers to follow on Twitter in my profile: https://twitter.com/_justinpenner/lists

    Also, I've seen various comments in the past about Slack/Discord communities for type designers, but I haven't managed to find any of them. Are there any active ones that are open for anyone to join? I think @Paul Hanslow mentioned starting one a while back.
  • Paul Hanslow
    Paul Hanslow Posts: 175
    Justin Penner said:

    Also, I've seen various comments in the past about Slack/Discord communities for type designers, but I haven't managed to find any of them. Are there any active ones that are open for anyone to join? I think @Paul Hanslow mentioned starting one a while back.
    Yes! Creating a type Discord for up-and-coming type designers is something that's on my mind, I've just been a little busy and haven't fully fleshed out the concept. Hopefully it'll kick off in 2022 as connecting young type designers is a valuable endeavour in my opinion.
  • Koksiroj - Joris Kok
    Koksiroj - Joris Kok Posts: 3
    Paul Hanslow said:
    Justin Penner said:

    Also, I've seen various comments in the past about Slack/Discord communities for type designers, but I haven't managed to find any of them. Are there any active ones that are open for anyone to join? I think @Paul Hanslow mentioned starting one a while back.
    Yes! Creating a type Discord for up-and-coming type designers is something that's on my mind, I've just been a little busy and haven't fully fleshed out the concept. Hopefully it'll kick off in 2022 as connecting young type designers is a valuable endeavour in my opinion.

    Hello! A friend of mine sent a link to this post since I actually made a Discord server that's for this! It's called Glyphs & Alphabets, and it's meant to fill the lack of typography and writing system enthusiasts spaces on Discord.

    I noticed that a lot of design servers lacked a proper community about typography and that a lot of linguistic servers lacked channels about orthography, constructed scripts, and just generally being excited about letters. Thus, I created one!

    I highly recommend you guys join it, as it's a nice way to chat casually about type, while still keeping good quality posts on this forum.

    You can join with this link. We'd love to have you there!

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