I’m super excited to announce the release of Auction, my first retail font! You can purchase it here.
Auction is an experiment—an unfinished family of fonts. It’s an experiment which begins with the question of “Why can’t we treat fonts similar to other pieces of software?” Nearly every piece of software you own is constantly being updated—fonts on the other hand are almost never updated after they’re released. Rather than releasing Auction when it’s completely finished, I’m releasing it at it’s earliest stage and will be sending updates to customers as it continues to be developed.
I’m doing for several reasons. The first is because the self-imposed pressure of perfecting a typeface before releasing it has inhibited me from ever actually finishing any. The idea with this typeface is to be publicly transparent and iterative with it’s development. Rather than releasing a fully polished and finalized family of fonts, Auction is a living work in progress and I’m able to alleviate the pressure of perfection.
That leads the the second reason for this experiment: by making this an iterative process that’s constantly being updated, you’re learning what goes into developing a full family of fonts, and you’re given the opportunity to test drive the fonts as they’re being developed so you can provide your own feedback and suggestions. We often feel inclined to only share finished work that has already been shipped. Unfortunately, this renders all possible feedback useless. Auction and it’s iterative release is a response to that expectation of finalized work.
You can look at this in two ways: As a beta test or as a pre-order.
If you’re a designer, I encourage you to treat this as a beta test. You can install each font update, and use them on personal or commercial projects to see how they work. Since I want this whole process to be really transparent and collaborative, I strongly welcome and encourage constructive criticism, feedback, and suggestions.
On the other hand, if you don’t want to deal with downloading every font update nor have any interest in using an unfinished font, then you can sit back, treat this as a pre-order, and wait until the final typeface is complete.
How This Works
The whole point of this is to turn the traditional type release of a final, polished product into an open, iterative, and collaborative process. Auction is a living work in progress and will continue to be updated. Once you purchase the fonts, you’ll receive all of the updates for free. With every update, the price will increase. So the sooner you buy the type, the more you can potentially save.
To start, Auction 1.0 is available in 4 weights (Light, Regular, Bold, and Heavy), and only includes uppercase letterforms. Updates down the road will include lowercase, numerals, punctuation, language support, additional styles, better spacing and kerning, and so on. Each update will be done incrementally over time. Just to reiterate, once you buy the fonts, you get all additional updates for free. If you don’t buy the fonts now, just know that with every update the price is going to increase.