The brief
The foundry sold four families and had a specimen page that showed the alphabet. Buyers kept asking the same question: what does it look like set as a paragraph, in my language, at my size?
Role: Concept, interaction design, build
Process
- Replaced the alphabet with editable specimens, so the page starts as something readable rather than a grid of glyphs
- Added language and optical-size switching, which surfaced two spacing bugs in the fonts themselves
- Kept the whole thing under 60 kB so it loads on the conference wifi where most licences are actually decided
Outcome
Licence enquiries roughly doubled in the quarter after launch, on the foundry's own count. The tool is now how they proof new weights.
What I would change
Making the specimen editable turned a marketing page into an instrument. Nobody asked for that; it came from watching one person try to paste their own text into a screenshot.