Fontane.Studio

As a seasonal partnership manager at the Comic Invasion Berlin festival, I’ve been organising Comic Font workshops since 2024, together with the type designer Sylvain Mazas and with the generous support of the Glyphs.App spearheads Rainer and Georg.

As Glyphs.App only works on macOS, artists with iPads or Windows PCs were not able to participate. And with the advent of AI building I gave it a shot.

Anyone could have uploaded a licensed typeface like Helvetica and published it as free. An account would not have stopped that: being signed in says nothing about where a font came from.

So the gate is built on server-stamped drawing events instead. To publish, the strokes have to have been drawn in Fontane and the server has to have seen them happen. That keeps other people’s typefaces out, and the marketplace to fonts that were made here.

You can find more about my security process here ↗.

A first rough prototype based on a comprehensive vision

Testing, iterating and getting some feedback, repeat

Add, try, review, strip, develop features further

After a deep UX, security, bug-fixing and feature review session the editor was rebuilt from scratch, as the first version made drawing feel like fighting the tool.

It’s become a comprehensively sweet, easy and quite fast tool to use. I am looking forward to building all the fonts that are waiting in my head.

Users can give feedback, report bugs or suggest improvements through the app, so I am curious what comes up — the last feedback was incredibly helpful.