Marmite Defontes

Guillaume Berry just launched a new site for the type foundry Marmite Defontes and by golly if it just sure ain’t the prettiest/fastest website I’ve seen today. This project is a great reminder that speed is more important than almost any other quality of a cool website. I am taking furious notes.

Another detail I love besides the sheer speed of this site is how each page has a distinct, bright color, making every page feel like a card that you’ve zoomed into from the homepage. I expect that once the View Transitions API gets more steam then this sort of zoomable UI is going to be real common on the web. Everything will soon be cards.

But look! So much lovely stuff to oogle at, even when the foundry is just getting started:

Marmite Defontes has three fonts available now: Kuiper, Piggle, and Snacks. My favorite of the bunch has to be the Piggle family, first for the name and second for the subclass within it being called Puff—cheeky block letters with a playful kick here and there.

The lowercase e is a good example of just how charming and odd this typeface gets. One variant has a small lump in the counter space, as if it’s smiling like a six year old:

Also can I rant about trial fonts for a sec? As I’ve been working on a freelance design project I’ve noticed that a lot of foundries don’t offer trial fonts at all—probably for good reasons that are entirely logical to them—but for us web designers it just encourages us to go with the safest option from Google Fonts. Let me use your fonts! Trust your customers not to be jerks! Gimme trial fonts so that I can see if your typeface is the right fit for this project!

That’s exactly what Marmite Defontes has done here, where they offer full versions of the font as a trial. I have no data to back this up (type designers get in touch!) but I believe that this improves the likelihood of us buying your fonts.

Anywho, if you’re as excited as I am to see what Berry is up to next, don’t forget to subscribe to the newsletter.