The long way to a foundry

I've been fascinated by type from an early age. My earliest memory reaches back to my childhood in the 90s: a movie I watched on VHS, in which an Egyptologist drew ancient hieroglyphs with what looked like an early version of FontLab. I rewound the scene again and again, trying to work out exactly what he was doing. At the time, my father published a mountain bike magazine, and I would regularly fiddle around in its graphics department — designing flyers and fictional magazine covers in QuarkXPress on Macintosh computers that were cutting-edge back then.

I began drawing typefaces myself during my graphic design studies. Glyphs had just entered the market and lifted custom type design to a new level: its fresh workflow and remarkably fair pricing enabled a whole generation of aspiring type enthusiasts to produce professional-grade fonts with ease. Over the years, I built up a sizeable catalogue of my own private fonts, alongside a rather high-end roster of custom typefaces for clients such as Maison Margiela(opens in a new tab) and Adidas. But I never managed to establish a foundry of my own — until my long-time friend and collaborator Stefan Endress made me the offer I'd been hoping for over a decade. He and his team at »Magic as a Service«, their software start-up, designed and built the website and took on the business side, while I focused on refining and extending the fonts and building a sophisticated production infrastructure.

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Over the course of two years, I developed a standardised font repository, a library of Glyphs scripts, an intricate font-export workflow for Glyphs and a custom specimen web app. We meticulously formalised the entire process — development, testing and deployment to the website. So what sets Dreamtype apart from the countless other great foundries out there? Mainly three things.

1. The most competitive licensing and pricing.

In short: our price curve stays very flat at the start and steepens towards the end. We want to support small teams and start-ups with unbeatable value for money, so our pricing is tied to one thing only — company size — not to computers or page views. Any company with fewer than 50 people always gets an unlimited licence: use the font in any medium, at any scale, as long as it's for your own use.

2. Optical sizing in every font.

One of the most common mistakes in typesetting is incorrect spacing. Spacing depends largely on font size, and getting it right every time can be a chore. For years, designers have compensated by bluntly reducing the space between letters. Our variable fonts handle this themselves — elegantly, from fine print to poster size. You can always intervene, but you don't have to.

3. Fonts equipped to the fullest.

Our mission is to delight designers with the best possible toolkit. Every font ships with an extended character set built on Google's well-considered standards, plus character variants, arrows and icons. And every purchase includes the complete bundle: italics, optical sizes, subsets and — where available — non-Latin scripts and stylistic sets.

My dream of running a foundry began at 25. Dreamtype launched in November 2025, just as I turned 40. We started with releasing Mirage(opens in a new tab), followed by BRICK(opens in a new tab) in 2026.

TRIONDA Dreamtype’s first custom font job for Adidas and their official tournament ball for the FIFA worldcup 2026