Its hard to remem­ber, now that were used to them, but the intro­duc­tion of web fonts changed every­thing in design­in­clud­ing how type hous­es made and sold their products.

The turtle wins the race: A custom shopping experience

No type house is big­ger than Mono­type Imag­ing, and big usu­al­ly means not espe­cial­ly nim­ble. When Mono­type Imag­ing asked us to redesign their flag­ship fonts.com web­site, they hoped we would get them on the web font train ahead of their small­er (and the­o­ret­i­cal­ly spry­er) com­peti­tors. We did that. And we did more.

Our team designed a vari­ety of ele­gant yet delight­ful­ly play­ful font selec­tion process­es through­out the site, while strip­ping down and redefin­ing the shop­ping cart process. Few­er clicks and screens meant few­er aban­doned shop­ping carts, and a more nat­ur­al and ful­fill­ing (and there­fore less frus­trat­ing and dis­tract­ing) expe­ri­ence for the cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als who use fonts.com.

Problem: Lack of customer passion

In addi­tion to arriv­ing ear­li­er and with a bet­ter means of pro­vid­ing web­fonts, Mono­type was seek­ing love. Fonts are a cre­ative busi­ness, and cre­atives give their hearts to bou­tiques. Win­ning fans comes more nat­u­ral­ly to small type shops with quirky out­puts than it does for indus­try giants like Mono­type (or Microsoft, or IBM, or oth­er big corporations).

Solution: Connect to the community

To human­ize Mono­type and remind design­ers that, big com­pa­ny or not, Mono­type was every bit a house that design built, we cre­at­ed an exten­si­ble design sys­tem focus­ing on hero images (before that was even a thing) cre­at­ed by indi­vid­ual designers.

What bet­ter way to bring life to fontsand to return the spark of life and com­mu­ni­ty to the designer/company con­nec­tion­than by fea­tur­ing the work of (often lit­tle-known) prac­ti­tion­ers from the design com­mu­ni­ty who found cre­ative inspi­ra­tion in Mono­types font offer­ings? The gallery of ever-chang­ing hero images brought fame to indi­vid­ual design­ers, and cre­ative lus­ter to indi­vid­ual fonts.

Near­ly ten years (and two redesigns) since we did this work, the hero image at the top is going stronger than ever, sales are strong, and Mono­type grows from strength to strength.

Vis­it the site: https://www.fonts.com

Our responsibilities on this project

Strat­e­gy; research; user expe­ri­ence design; infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture; user inter­face design; front-end devel­op­ment; post-deliv­ery con­sult­ing on mid­dle­ware imple­men­ta­tions and design