Fontane.Studio

Draw glyphs, ligatures and contextual alternates by hand; the editor builds an OpenType file from the strokes themselves.

Its own project file, a .fff, carries the work between devices, so a drawing started on a tablet can be finished on a PC. An open marketplace publishes finished fonts, and the site runs on cookie-free analytics of its own.

1. Workshops + Pain
2. Idea
3. Rough Proof of Concept
4. Test & iterate
5. First feedback
6. Refactor

A rough first prototype out of a comprehensive vision based on the workshop pains, then testing, feedback and iteration.

After a deep review the editor was rebuilt from scratch. The first version made drawing feel like fighting the tool, and no amount of patching was going to fix that.

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.

More about the security process here ↗.

Adoption is picking up, and people spend more time on the app rather than just looking. The goal is to have the workflows and UX smooth until mid autumn ’26.

So far users report bugs and suggest improvements through the app. The last round of feedback had a very positive impact on the editor and triggered the landing page.