Renowned designer Jessica Walsh has long been known for her passion for type. And now she’s taken that to the next level by launching Type Of Feeling. It’s a type foundry with a difference, one that’s dedicated to creating unique typefaces that convey “distinct and rarely spoken emotions”.
“I have fallen in love with the power of unique typography and its power to tell stories and create an ownable brand language,” enthuses Jessica, who’s known for her New York-based creative studio &Walsh.
“Type of Feeling offers a select retail collection alongside custom typography services. Each typeface in our collection is meticulously crafted to evoke a range of feelings, blending artistic expression with functional design.”
Inspiration
Jessica’s inspiration came, as you might expect, from her own experience as a designer. “I’ve always believed that typography can be one of a brand’s most distinctive assets,” she explains. “In our brand projects, we try to push for custom typography because a font can convey so much effortlessly. When we don’t have the opportunity to do custom typography work, we spend a lot of time sifting through foundries and looking at non-trendy fonts that are still unique and ownable.”
But that hasn’t always worked out the way she’d hoped for. “We’ve spent a lot of time in foundries that were either too trendy or too mass-market, inspiring us to start our own,” she explains. In contrast, her aim with Type of Feeling has been to “establish a destination where each font is crafted to be not only expressive but also distinct and timeless”.
Seven typefaces are on offer at launch, and Jessica says there are more in the making. “A lot of scrapped ones, too,” she adds. “It was important to us not just to put more typefaces out into the world but to create fonts that we felt were very effective in evoking emotion and could allow for true distinctiveness when utilised by designers.
“So many foundries focus on creating typefaces for mass distribution,” she stresses. “We decided to hone in on more niche typefaces that can still have broad appeal while really helping brands stand out through their uniqueness.
“We also wanted to learn from designers about their pain points with discovering fonts, testing them, and licensing them so that we could build those learnings into Type of Feeling. Our goal was to simplify the whole process, as those details can be a very draining part of the design process for brands and designers.”
Target audience
So who are these fonts aimed at, exactly? “We picture our target audience as designers who want to create emotion-driven work,” says Lauren Walsh, strategy and new business. “We’ve priced our fonts to be accessible, so they can be used for small projects or by bigger brands. We’re all super excited to see how people use our fonts.
“After working on them for so long, you start to imagine them in specific settings,