Jessica Walsh and her team at &Walsh have launched Type of Feeling, an exciting new foundry.
Type of Feeling is an expansion in Jessica Walsh and her team’s mission to provide custom typography services “that move past pure function and speak to the soul of a brand on a deeper and more meaningful level.” The team deployed years of experience in brand identity and strategy to craft a collection of fonts designed to evoke particular moods and sentiments: joy (Jubel), cozy (Conforto), longing (Onsra), and tranquility (Serein), to name a few.
It’s no surprise that the award-winning creative director, the force behind Let’s Talk About Mental Health, a platform and safe space for dialog around well-being, and the founder of Ladies, Wine, and Design, a global initiative to champion creative women, has something deeper and more profound to say about typography.
“At &Walsh, we believe unique typography can be one of a brand’s most distinctive assets. When working with brands on custom type projects, we always set out to create typography that is not only distinctive but also full of emotion and feeling.” Jessica Walsh says. “For brands and designers that can’t afford custom typography, we wanted to create a retail collection on Type of Feeling built on these same principles of distinction and emotion.”
So, why a foundry? Especially considering that typography is essential to the branding and identity work the team already does for clients. The team didn’t set out with this objective in mind; it actually started as an experiment. “When we kicked off this project, we started by creating the fonts we, as a creative team, really wanted to see in the world. Fonts that make beautifully distinct headlines and create an emotional connection with the reader,” said Lauren Walsh, strategy for &Walsh. “It wasn’t until we had two fonts we were obsessed with that we started thinking about the foundry as a business.”
The foundry specializes in unique, timeless display typography for brands, whether the typeface is a bespoke project or one of the retail fonts available exclusively on the Type of Feeling website.
“Type of Feeling specializes in display typography that can be unique and distinct for a brand in a timeless way. Our typefaces are niche, so you won’t see them used everywhere, meaning they can retain some ownability for brands,” explained Jessica Walsh. The available alternate sets, weights, and glyphs amplify the retail fonts’ unique personalities.
As a fun aside, I asked Jessica Walsh if she had a favorite word in another language—conveying a sentiment we don’t have a word for in English. “In another language, I really like “sisu” which is about sticking to your guns when things get tough. Wabi Sabi is such a great one, too (accepting impermanence and imperfection),” said Walsh.
“Within our collection, each name is meant to evoke a very specific, hard-to-describe feeling,” Walsh continued. “Ssonder is my favorite because every detail of the font was designed to capture the delicacy of the feeling. It was crafted with beautiful ligature stylistic sets that reflect this concept of a web & the connections formed from experiences and memories. Ssonder is a beautiful example of what we set out to accomplish: creating a world for this feeling to exist in and for brands to see themselves in that world.”
Ssonder is drawn from the feeling and realization that each person you see, each person you pass, and each person that exists has their own complex & distinct life, like a gossamer web of experiences & memories. I’ve had this feeling before but never knew how to describe it.
Jesssica Walsh
My favorite sentiment is the German word “fernweh,” which is a longing for faraway places, perhaps homesickness for places you’ve never been. I’d love to see what the Type of Feeling team would create for it!
So, what was the team’s favorite part of creating Type of Feeling? “I was amazed by all the possibilities that come with launching a font. It’s not just about the typeface itself, but everything that surrounds it—like usage examples, the specimen, and the art direction of its presentation,” said art director Lucas Luz. Type designer Sanchit Sawaria noted that his biggest surprise was “discovering hidden type design talent amongst people you work with every day.”
No emotion has been ruled out; we think each poses a unique perspective on a future typeface. Even negative emotions are part of our humanity and should be felt and, therefore, reflected in our collection. The more complex the emotion, the better!
Jessica Walsh
As for what we’ll see next out of Type of Feeling, Walsh said, “We love the idea of taking this opportunity to learn about different emotions and feelings in different languages.”
Jessica Walsh explained that in the five years of creating Type of Feeling, the team created many fonts outside this release (and scrapped many more, too). “It was important to us to not just put more typefaces out into the world but to create ones we felt were very effective in evoking emotion and could allow for true distinctiveness when utilized by designers.”
“We also wanted to take the time 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 is to continue to make distinct yet timeless typefaces that are filled with emotion.” Walsh continued. “We also would love to collaborate with our peers in the industry to see what their take is on our foundry’s mission to create type based on feelings: our doors are always open!”
Peruse the website at typeoffeeling.com or get in touch with Jessica Walsh and the team to collaborate at info@typeoffeeling.com.