← All work Case 03 of 03 2025
Verso Type Foundry
A foundry whose first page is your own headline, set in their type.
- Role
- Design and front-end build
- Timeline
- 9 weeks, 2025
- With
- Sadia Amrani and Maarten de Groot, founders
- Stack
- TypeScript, variable-font tooling, static hosting
01 · Brief
Brief
Verso is a two-person foundry with six families and a quiet reputation among book designers. Their specimens were PDFs.
A designer who wanted to try a face had to download it, install it, and then email to ask what a licence for a small magazine would cost.
“People set their own headline in our faces before they’ve read a word about us. That’s the whole pitch, and now it’s the first thing on the page.”
02 · Constraint
The type had to be the interface.
A foundry site whose buttons are set in someone else’s typeface is arguing with itself. Every control on a specimen is set in the face being shown, and the tester loads one family at a time so the page never waits for all six.
03 · Process
How it came together
- 01
Specimens, not brochures
We cut every page that described the type and kept the ones that showed it: a long text setting, a headline, the figures, and the awkward characters people ask about.
- 02
A tester you can break
The tester takes any text, any size, every axis. If your headline needs a character the family doesn’t have, it says so instead of quietly falling back.
- 03
Prices in plain numbers
The licence calculator replaced a pricing PDF. Seats and web traffic in, a price out, and the same number on the invoice.
04 · Build
The type tester, running
The tester and licence calculator as working components, set here in this site’s own faces. Type your own line.
Instrument Serif ships one weight, in roman and italic.
Licence for this family
€150 · desktop €90 for 2 seats, web €60, one-off, excl. VAT
05 · Outcome
Outcome
- trial downloads in the first quarter
- 2.4×
- median time on a specimen page
- 3 min 12 s
- licence emails, down from about one per order
- 1 a week
Two new families launched on the site this year, each specimen built from the same parts in under a day.
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