Aarron Walter
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Design Better · Tom Foley: How to pair typefaces and why the best brand fonts go…
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Which Typefaces Does Tom Foley Recommend?
Tom Foley recommends three typefaces more people should use: Lexicon, Macklin, and Blenny.
Lexicon, from the Dutch Type Library, was designed by Bram de Does for dictionaries and hard typesetting. Foley calls it the most beautiful typeface in the world and says it is underused because it is expensive. Macklin is by Malou Verlomme, a colleague from Monotype. Foley thinks it came out around 2022. It is a large family of serifs, slabs, and sans, all variable, and he thinks it was one of the first big variable families. He loves it and wishes it were used more. Blenny is by Spike Spondike, who worked at Dalton Maag, then Colophon, and now Monotype. Foley thinks she released it at Dalton Maag ar
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How Did Tom Foley First Fall for Typography?
Tom Foley first fell for letters pretty young, long before he knew the word typography.
Aarron Walter welcomed him to Design Better and asked when typography first lit him up. Foley grew up around an uncle who is still alive and worked as a sign painter, so making a living from drawing letters was already familiar. He was a little obsessed with handwriting and joined-up writing. He says he was maybe seven or eight when he pestered his dad to teach him cursive.
Later he found that a few generations back on his dad's side there were stonemasons carving headstones and lettering. Right through school, art and design were the only things he was good at. He was terrible academically. When he got