Heya, this is Harry from Village One! We are interrupting the regular programming for something exciting we launched this week: After six months of work we are overjoyed to see the new TypeMates.com website + shop out in the wild!
012: Say hello to the all-new TypeMates website + shop
If you don’t know the TypeMates: They are a type foundry selling retail typefaces to you and me, but also working with big companies on custom type solutions. Last year they approached us about a website relaunch and we started work in October. They’ve been the best clients imaginable, taking a very active role in the process, obsessing over every little detail with us. They even did all the branding and interaction design themselves, and then we turned it into front-end/back-end code to bring it to life!
You can keep reading or watch me demo it all in this short video!
So what does the site do? A lot! It presents all their typefaces in the best possible light, with interactive testers, endless opentype features to explore, complete character sets even for icon fonts, tons of videos and animations, lets you explore their variable fonts, download trial versions, filter their fonts collection by a variety of attributes, features a quick and easy-to-use checkout, lets you download pdf offers from any cart, share the cart with other people (in case somebody else controls the credit card), has a huge news section, case studies on custom type projects, is available in German and English, in light and dark mode, retains all user and order data from the previous site, features a modular license text … the list just keeps going. We also worked hard to make it beautifully responsive and blazinggg fastttttt. Click around, you’ll see!
As with every launch, lots of features and ideas sadly didn’t make the cut. That’s why we’re very happy to be able to keep working on it for another month, taking feedback into account and refining it further. From our side Fei and I worked on it, with Sev Furneaux supporting us on a freelance basis during the final stretch!
Technically speaking we’ve built a custom e-commerce solution based on Craft CMS + Craft Commerce, used Tailwind to turn the design system into CSS and chose petite-vue for light-weight front-end interactions.
Check it out and consider supporting a super nice independent type foundry by getting some of their fonts for your next project! Oh, and if your website or web app could use a similar relaunch, well, you know where to find us!
Next week we’ll be back with Christoph’s interview! See you then!
Harry