Fonts In Use

Fonts In Use is an archive of typography as it was actually printed, screened, and shipped. The unit of the site is a use: one piece of design work, given a title, a year, a credit for the designer or studio, a credit for whoever submitted it, and an image. Underneath each one is the part that makes the archive searchable, a list of the typefaces identified in that piece, each linking to a page that gathers every other use of the same face. Reading in the other direction, a typeface page becomes the answer to "where has this actually been used and did it work". Entries are filed by format and by topic as well, so the archive can be entered from the design side rather than the type side.

The range is wide in both period and medium. A single pass across the front page turns up 1957 and 1962 album art for Ray Henry's orchestra and Sarah Vaughan, a 1972 German Joan Baez single sleeve, the 1979 Prince Jammy dub cover, the main and end titles of The Breakfast Club (1985), the Jetix logo from around 2004, an exhibition catalog at the Musée McCord Stewart, Eye magazine issue 108, a Pizza Hut vertical pizza box, and a saree bag from a shop in India. The typefaces attached run from Helvetica, Futura, Univers, Optima and Cooper Black to releases nobody outside type circles has heard of.

Submissions come from a mix of individuals and the type industry itself. Foundries and studios credit their own faces in the wild — TypeType, LucasFonts, Frere-Jones Type, 205TF, Kyiv Type Foundry, Order Type Foundry — alongside contributors like Florian Hardwig and David Jonathan Ross posting finds. Staff Picks mark editorially chosen entries. Dates are recorded as loosely as the evidence allows, with "c. 2024" used where the exact year is not known, and unidentified typeface exists as a real linkable entry, so a use with an unresolved face is still catalogued rather than dropped.

The closest neighbour on the wiki is typesetinthefuture-blog, which does the opposite job: one work at a time, read exhaustively, with the argument in the reading. Fonts In Use has no argument. It is the index that makes an argument like typesetinthefuture-futuristic checkable, since claiming a typeface signals something specific requires being able to pull up the rest of its history. The source on file is a snapshot of the homepage feed, so the browse structure and the size of the archive are not recorded here.

Typography with no typeface choice at all is the subject of monospace-justification: in a text file every glyph is the same width, so the only way to justify a paragraph is to rewrite it.