Hoefler & Co.—until a few months ago, Hoefler & Frere-Jones—is a type foundry established in New York by American typographer Jonathan Hoefler. Obviously, the term “foundry” refers to the traditional way of making types and not the current procedure, but many typographers still use it.

Jonathan Hoefler joined their knowledge on the subject to Tobias Frere-Jones’, also American typographer, in 2004. In the ten years since then they have designed some truly remarkable typefaces.

Hoefler & Co.—its website can be accessed at www.typography.com— currently offers thirty eight typefaces in his magnificent collection. Among them, some classics, such as Didot, and other highly successful in recent years, as the applauded—and perhaps overused—Gotham.

From my point of view, the best thing about this foundry is not a single one out of the thirty eight typefaces hurts.

The proliferation of origins—many of them, spurious—of typefaces that has taken place during the last years has produced a number of replicas and substitutes, in many cases of dubious quality, of some of the most respectable typefaces in the history of foundries.

This has resulted in some “devaluation” of the importance of typography itself, so that it would seem irrelevant whether a typeface was designed better or worse, as long as an “a” looks like an “a” and a “m” looks like a “m”—sometimes I think this kind of trivialization of things is spreading in many areas of learning, but this would be a topic for another article.

Against this trend, Hoefler & Co. has a remarkably neat collection with very different styles, able to serve for many designers and very different purposes.

There is no typeface in this collection which use I would refuse beforehand. On the contrary, I would like to have projects that fit this or that font; there are some really great ones: Tungsten Rounded, Nitro & Turbo—a curious dual typeface with letters slanting to both sides respectively—, Landmark, Publisher,…

Anyone want to make me an assignment that is suitable to use these typefaces?

Furthermore, Hoefler & Co. offers cloud.typography, a “cloud” of typefaces accessible by subscription at fairly reasonable prices, taking into account the quality of the available collections. Prices vary depending on the number of visits that a website in which they are used gets.

Moreover, Hoefler & Co. maintains a website worth a renowned type foundry. If the main purpose of a typeface is design, typography.com honors that purpose. Not only it is well designed and attractive, but also it offers useful sections for the typographer or graphic designer, such as Techniques o Discover Typography, both pages that propose interesting resources for design professionals.