31st October, 2023 by Rob Keller
Let’s party 🥳 Mota Italic is celebrating 15 years in the font game!
Now seems like an opportune time to share a chronicle of all our ups and downs, all the adventures we had between founding in Berlin in 2008, to relocating to India for six years, to moving back to Berlin in 2020… a lot has happened along this amazing journey.
But we are better at drawing letters than using them 🤪 So instead of a proper memoir of our escapades, we will focus on just two specific things:
1) A huge thank you is in order for all our amazing customers & clients. It’s because of you, licensing our fonts and entrusting us with your projects, that we get to keep doing what we love. With the exception of some teaching gigs, we’ve been fortunate enough to sustain ourselves entirely through type design for a whopping 15 years. This is truly our dream career, and it wouldn’t be possible without you!
2) We have compiled a few stats regarding our work. It was personally very interesting to discover these numbers – hopefully you will also find them fascinating 🤓
Retail Families
🔥
Fifteen retail families are for sale
Our typefaces are available here, at I Love Typography, or at Future Fonts!
⚡️
Six families are currently in their beta phase
This means that they aren’t done done, but are already commercially available. These works-in-progress are already quite far along, are totally usable, and are sold at a fraction of the price of the final families. License now, and get all future updates for free! Check them out!
🚧
Six other families are currently in development
These are all new families, not yet seen ;)
Retail Fonts
The individual styles that make up the families.
🤩
587 Individual Retail fonts
🧑🎨
96 fonts are masters, i.e. were manually created
🤖
497 were interpolated = automatically generated
Custom Fonts
Commissioned work for awesome clients!
🤟
Custom projects
😲
Custom fonts created
😱
There are more than 80,000 glyphs in our custom fonts
✌️
We have worked on over a hundred fonts for other foundries
Glyphs
All the characters that make up the fonts
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Our fonts average 1,400 glyphs per file
🤯
There are over a million glyphs in our retail fonts
✏️
More than 66,000 were manually drawn by hand
🎛️
More than 900,000 glyphs were partially, or fully, interpolated
Nodes
The points that define the bezier outlines of the glyphs
👇
We have placed more than 5 Million Nodes by hand!
↔️
If those nodes were bricks made into a wall (just a single brick high), it would be more than 1000km long (+600 miles)!
🚀
If the nodes were humans standing on each other’s shoulders they’d be more than 8000km high… that’s 2% of the way to the moon!
🏋️
If the nodes were jelly doughnuts, they’d weigh over 300,000 kg (660,000 lbs)!
Thank you again for all your support over these last 15 years! We really appreciate you for making this work possible!
Happy designing, and please keep supporting living type designers 😄🙏
P.S. — All those rad numbers seen above can be found in our Collection typeface: Check it out!