After months of hard work and collaboration with some of the type industry’s leading foundries, today we’re proud to launch Typekit Marketplace — thousands of fonts completely new to our catalog, and a new way to find and buy type.

This is the biggest expansion we’ve ever made to our service, and we’re excited to take this step. Building on the work we did with our recent redesign, we’re launching Typekit Marketplace in an environment that we carefully planned to meet the needs of customers and type foundry partners alike. In doing this, our goal is to eliminate much of the inconvenience and uncertainty designers face in finding and buying type.

Typekit Marketplace augments the existing selection of premium fonts in the Typekit Library with thousands more, from over 20 foundry partners. Each is available for purchase at an additional one-time cost, set by the foundry, through an easy and intuitive interface that we’ve taken enormous pains to get right. Once purchased, fonts from Typekit Marketplace are added to your personal library on Typekit, and can be used in all the same places — whether that’s on a website or synced to your applications through Creative Cloud.

Why pay for type?

Type is a tool, and a very important one, that enables designers to do their best work. In his excellent article on Dear Design Student, our own Tim Brown frames type as the investment it truly is, describing how skimping on type can end up being even more expensive.

It’s not impossible to do great design with free fonts, nor is it impossible to do great work with free stock photography. But professional designers primarily depend on the quality and consistency that comes from professionally-produced photos and type to use in their work.

We’ve always been proud of the foundry partners in our subscription library — not one of them ended up in there by accident. And we’re thrilled to broaden our view today with Typekit Marketplace, which brings even more of the world’s most prestigious and well-known type foundries under a single umbrella.

Just to be clear: The Typekit library isn’t going anywhere, and all the (thousands!) of fonts there are still included with paid Creative Cloud subscriptions — one of the best investments you can make as a designer. We’ve added more than 1,200 new fonts to the library so far this year (all of them for web and sync) and we plan to keep adding more in the coming months and years.

Simplified licensing

Type licensing is hard — really hard! Every seller that offers type has their own license agreement, which may or may not cover commercial use, use on the web, production of physical goods, etc. Understanding what the license does and doesn’t permit can mean poring over a license thick with legalese. That’s not how we want you spending your time.

All Typekit fonts are offered under a license that covers the rights and uses that our customers expect, covering both web and desktop sync use. Typekit Marketplace fonts also come with a foundry-specific EULA, which will never contradict our simple explanation of the permitted uses. So when you buy a font from Typekit Marketplace, you can rest easy knowing that it will be safe to use in your work.

Partners we’re proud to support

As of our launch today, the Typekit Marketplace inventory includes typefaces from more than 20 of the most prestigious and well-known foundries in the type industry. I’d like to give a special shout out to two of our newest foundry partners: Frere-Jones Type and Type Network. Both provided us with an incalculable amount of feedback and support that helped us craft the experience you’re seeing today.

Foundries who choose to make their fonts available on Typekit Marketplace are able to set their own prices for their fonts, and enjoy a significant share of the revenue that Adobe receives for each typeface purchase. This “app store” model works alongside the Typekit library model, offering type designers another great way to reach the millions of customers who use Creative Cloud in their daily work.

We know good type

Adobe has been an integral part of the digital type industry for nearly thirty years. Our own in-house type foundry has produced more than 100 original typefaces, including many indispensable classics like Myriad, Minion, Adobe Garamond, Trajan, and Acumin. With the Marketplace launch, many Adobe Originals are available on Typekit for the first time.

While Adobe continues to produce new original designs, we are also uniquely positioned in the type industry to contribute to the advancement of open standards, and to advance the state of the art in the technology of digital type. We’ve put a lot of that expertise towards Typekit Marketplace, and we’d like to invite you to take a look around and let us know what you think.

Update, Nov. 3: We rewrote the “All Typekit fonts” paragraph under “Simplified licensing,” for clarity. Thanks for the feedback!