Typecast Joins Monotype

on Tuesday 30th of October 2012

Big news everyone. The hugest, in fact. We have a brand new teammate, and we couldn’t be more pleased.

We’re delighted to announce that as of today, Monotype is the proud owner of both Typecast and Front (our design agency).

It’s fantastic news for our little app – allowing us to grow and improve the service while also giving our team access to significantly more resources.
Monotype is a legend in the world of typography. For over 125 years they’ve improved and promoted typography and technologies that ease the design and production issues related to fonts. More recently, they’ve made big strides in the world of web fonts with their font-hosting service Fonts.com (one of Typecast’s original partners) and the acquisition of My Fonts (a fantastic fonts service with some of the most beautiful typefaces for the web).
Like us, they’re passionate about typography, and like us, they’re keen to help creative people do more with type on the web.

Why sell now?

Don’t worry. We’re selling up, not out. While some companies sell and walk away, we’re holding on tightly to Typecast and not letting go. But selling was the best way to do justice to you and the app.

You see, we’re a 14-person design agency. We believed so strongly that there was a better way to design with web fonts that we decided to take a year off of client work to put our whole team on the planning, development, testing and promotion of Typecast. And we footed the bill ourselves.
But with our year now up, we started facing tough choices. How could we keep making Typecast better AND run the company? A return to client work would mean we could pay the bills, but it would significantly slow progress on Typecast. To continue focusing on Typecast alone would mean raising external funding.

Monotype couldn’t have chosen a better time to reach out to us. Others have offered to buy Front in the past, but it was never the right fit. This time, it was perfect.

A boost for Typecast

By joining the Monotype family, all 14 members of our team (including our CEO Paul and creative director Jamie) will have the chance to continue working on Typecast. It also means we’ll be able to keep expanding it and working with you to make it the premier web typography app. We’ll be leaving client work behind forever, and we may even have the chance to bring you some related tools we’ve been brainstorming.

We’ll keep trying to partner with lots of font services (not just Fonts.com) and will be able to share Typecast with loads more designers thanks to Monotype’s customer base.

Most importantly, Typecast will have everything it needs to grow into a happy, healthy adult: love, lots of attention, and a stable home.

We couldn’t be happier with the news, and we hope you’ll join us in welcoming Monotype to the Typecast family/community. It wasn’t an easy decision, but we’re certain it was the right one – for the future of Typecast, our team and you, our users.

You can find out more about the acquisition in the official announcement.

If you have any questions, feel free to add them below and we’ll get you an answer.

Footnote

Since writing this post on 30 October, we’ve received questions below as well as via Twitter and email. You can read our responses to these in this post.