TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Wed Sep 9 23:21:00 EDT 2015

FONT RECOGNITION VIA FONT MOOSE

LUC DEVROYE

ABOUT

MyFonts.com [Laurence Penney]

MyFonts is a division of Bitstream Inc., located in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Its mission is to make it simple for everyone to find and buy fonts. In pursuit of this mission, MyFonts has pioneered new ways to search for fonts when one does not have an exact font in mind. The concept of MyFonts was born in 1999 when Charles Ying, Bitstream's Chairman of the Board, wanted to find a font for a particular project. He was horrified to discover that the only way to find fonts on the web was to know the name of the font you were looking for, or browse a flat alphabetical list. Why can't I just search for wedding fonts, he asked. This should be as easy as shopping for shoes! I should be able to point at a font in a magazine and say, Show me fonts like this. Charles reasoned that making it hard to find and buy fonts for the average computer user meant turning away 99.9% of the potential market for fonts. He called for an open marketplace, where fonts from many vendors could compete side-by-side. Charles personally hired the initial team and commissioned a site design from (now defunct) Calgary-based Fusion Media Group. MyFonts began selling the Bitstream library on March 20, 2000 through the MyFonts.com website. It now has over 60,000 fonts from about 800 foundries. It includes WhatTheFont (was Identafont) (send scanned images to the site for automatic recognition), "Show me more like this", TypeXplorer (font space browser), type designer and foundry info. The project manager is Laurence Penney. List of designers.

Postmortem: While it remains active, MyFonts and Bitstream were acquired by Monotype in 2012.

EXTERNAL LINKS
MyFonts.com
 [Buy fonts]
MyFonts search
Monotype search
Google search

INTERNAL LINKS
Font vendors ⦿ Typography ⦿ MyFonts Pages ⦿