Jessica Walsh Just Launched A New Type Foundry Where Every Font Gets A Feeling

Jessica Walsh has never shied away from feeling her feelings. She’s also never been shy about turning them into design side projects. A few such examples: her public quest to become a more empathetic person, her campaign to foster dialogue around mental health, and her viral dating experiment.

So it tracks that feelings are at the core of her new type foundry that launches today. That foundry, Type of Feeling, was created with an unusual premise. She and her team sought to reverse-engineer fonts around a wide berth of sentiments and moods, from joy to longing. “I’m a big believer that all the best design work has some sort of emotion in it,” she says. “It was quite fun to find these different feelings or emotions and then figure out how to design a typeface around them.”

During the downtime of the pandemic, the founder and creative director of &Walsh and her sister, Lauren Walsh, who heads up strategy and new business at the studio, sought ways to keep their full roster employed and utilize their talents in different ways. Like many studios, the team at &Walsh had a wealth of scrapped custom type left over from previous projects—and in it, they found the inspiration for the new endeavor.

Type of Feeling will offer both retail and bespoke typefaces (ideally, they hope the foundry will be a 50/50 mix of the two). Initially, the foundry is launching with seven offerings, and the team currently has some 30 works-in-progress. Walsh hopes to release two or so a year. As for the pricing strategy of the retail faces, Walsh notes that the foundry is focused on accessibility and getting their typefaces into the hands of as many people as possible.

To that end, prices vary based on size and scope: a print license for a single user for, say, Jubel, runs $35. The license for 25 employees rises to $250. For 500 employees, $2,500. Walsh says the team plans to offer a low flat rate for personal use of all the faces, and will also work with nonprofits or similar organizations to adjust pricing to their needs.

Building a business around feelings

The Western type world is dominated by a few behemoth distributors and players—notably Monotype, which owns the rights to such stalwarts as Helvetica and Times New Roman—but the most exciting stuff often tends to come from the many indies out there.

Tapping into feelings is a nice hook for the new business, and a logical throughline with Walsh’s previous work, but it isn’t a gimmick. She believes human emotion can enhance brand identities and resonate deeply with audiences, allowing products to stand out in crowded marketplaces.

“You don’t even need to have much else in a visual identity system if you have a strong and distinct typeface,” Walsh says. 

When hunting for typefaces for projects, she adds, it’s difficult to find one that’s distinct but not so trendy it will have limited shelf life. Display type (think headlines and large size uses) fits that profile, and is the niche Walsh hopes Type of Feeling will fill.

“There are so many beautifully designed workhorse sans serif typefaces [out there], and those, truthfully, are going to be the money makers,” she says with a laugh. “But what was hard for us to find were those more unusual but timeless typefaces. So as a passion project, that’s really what we wanted to focus on.”

The emotion of type

Type of Feeling’s first typefaces run the aesthetic gamut. Consider Jubel, a word that means “joy” in different languages; the team wanted it to feel as if it were shouting with exuberance, which they accomplished via bold letterforms that have thick strokes and curves to convey excitement. (Walsh’s favorite part—the lowercase ‘e,’ which appears to be smiling at the viewer.)

Or, take Sonder. The typeface is named after the feeling of realization that everyone you pass by in the course of daily life has an inner world as rich as your own. Sonder focuses on an intricate web of connectedness, with curiously joined ligatures and other features. 

Elsewhere, the other terminals, tails and typographic details seek to convey a variety of nuanced notions. Satori interprets the Japanese term for a spiritual awakening; Onsra distills the Boro language’s word for longing; Serein riffs on the French for, yes, serenity.

Perhaps surprisingly, the site carries no &Walsh branding and no obvious indications that this standalone venture is a project from Jessica Walsh—or, well, much branding at all. And that is by design. 

“We wanted the brand to take a backseat to the typefaces,” Walsh says. “We don’t even have a logo for Type of Feeling. It’s just the name set in random typefaces from the collection, which changes every time you log on to the site. So it was really just about letting the typefaces speak for themselves.”

The specimens truly shine, showing a vast range of expressions and applications, from signage to packaging to garments to books and beyond. Love it or hate it, fonts absolutely elicit feelings. And in the age of AI everything, Walsh and her sister are betting on that fact.

“We just really feel like it’s going to be a period where brands need to work even harder to find distinction, and we really believe in typography,” says Lauren Walsh, managing director of the new venture. “We hope that we can continue to work with brands to really help them see the value . . . that typography can bring—and the longevity it can bring.”