Happy 7th Birthday FontStruct

Click the image to see 256 choice “seven” glyphs from the past seven years.

Dear FontStructors,

FontStruct was launched to the public on the first of April 2008.

1,047,435 users, 933,072 font designs and 1,286,686 downloads later we now have a public gallery showing 37,391 FontStructions. Thanks and congratulations to everyone who’s contributed over the past seven years. Extra special thanks as always to our main sponsor FontShop whose support continues to make all of this possible.

The FontStruct community has built a magnificent archive of modular typefaces over the past seven years and it deserves a fitting showcase, so today we’re launching an enhanced version of the gallery pages to make them faster to load, easier to use, and hopefully more attractive.

Too wide to illustrate in this slim blog layout!

The biggest change is a new, wider layout with much larger image previews of the FontStructions themselves.

The new search box suggests tags and offers direct links to matching FontStructions.

As you can see, we’ve added support for search suggestions. We’ve also tried to optimise the metadata (the information shown on the right next to each FontStruction), so for example we’re now showing license information in the gallery for the first time.

The new large previews are drawn by a new piece of software called the FontStruct Renderer. You’ll notice that they’re darker and “heavier” than the old previews. We’ll continue to optimise and improve the new renderer but it gives us much more flexibility in how we preview FontStructions, and it allows us to stop using Adobe Flash on Gallery pages. We hope to stop using Flash anywhere on the site eventually (yes even for the FontStructor).

We will also continue overhauling other parts of the website. “My FontStruct” font listings and Favorites are very similar to the main Gallery pages, so they are likely to be next in line for an update.

Please let us know what you think about the new Gallery by commenting on this post.

Thanks for reading and happy FontStructing!