A home for people who love type.

Hi, I’m Mark.

I’m Mark Johnson, the solo human behind Type.lol. I’m a product designer, a type designer, and the person behind TrashType.

Built on mornings, nights, and weekends in Brooklyn, New York. Fontgetaboutit.

A list that got out of hand.

I started Type.lol with Thomas Drach in 2016 as a way to find independent type foundries. It stayed a catalog for a long time because the things I wanted to build would have cost me a fortune to build and run.

That stopped being true in the last few years. Now I’m working on it solo and expanding Type.lol into more of the place I wanted to use myself: somewhere to discover, compare, collect, and understand type. Basically, Spotify for typography.

Type has been the constant.

I studied graphic design at Savannah College of Art and Design and interned at Pentagram. I worked for agencies, started an agency called Motel, and then moved into product design in tech, including Mixpanel and Clay.

Along the way, I studied type design at Type@Cooper and started TrashType. I’ve been on both sides of this: looking for the right typeface for a project and making typefaces for other people to use.

Realistically I’m probably better at product design than type design, and that’s why Type.lol has been so pleasant to work on.

Why I’m still working on it.

I want to be able to collect type, follow foundries, and discover the work independent type designers are doing. Those are the parts I’ve been building. Now I’m also working on getting foundries paid a fair price for work that takes years to create.

There’s no investor waiting on an exit and no acquirer I’m courting. My job pays my bills. Type.lol has come out of my own pocket since 2016, and I don’t plan to sell it.

Follow your type curiosity.

Start with a foundry you love, a typeface you have never seen, or a description of the mood you’re after. Browse typefaces, build collections for a project, and explore the connections between designers and foundries.

Finding the right type should lead you closer to the people who made it. Type.lol connects typefaces to their designers and foundries, with links back to the source.

Good for designers. Good for foundries.

The goal is to give designers better tools to find type for their projects, and help independent foundries make a living. The marketplace beta is the next part of that work: a place for foundries to sell on their own terms, without exclusivity or lock-in.

I run a foundry too. I want the tools I build here to be useful to the people making type as well as the people choosing it.

A growing catalog. A work in progress.

The catalog brings together information from foundry websites and other public sources. Automated tools help gather and organize it; that doesn’t mean every record has been individually verified. Credits, dates, and other details can be incomplete or wrong.

Foundries and designers can create an account and request to claim their page. Once the connection is approved, they can manage their information. If you spot something that needs fixing, send a correction and a source link.