Two people, one room, four families.
Tolland Type is Hedda Voss and Ilias Kerr. We met drawing signage for Dutch railways, started the foundry in 2019, and still answer every email ourselves.
Hedda Voss
Type designer. Draws the grotesques and the long evenings of spacing. Before Tolland she was a senior designer at a national newspaper, where she learned what a headline has to survive.
Ilias Kerr
Type designer and engineer. Builds the font files, the variable masters and this website. He spent six years on wayfinding for stations and airports, which is where Stellan Gothic began.
How a family gets made
1
Sketches
Pencil on tracing paper until the family has a voice. Usually forty pages of lowercase a, g and R.
2
Two masters
We draw the thinnest and the heaviest versions of every glyph, point for point, so they can be blended.
3
Interpolation
The masters become a design space. We check hundreds of in-between instances for kinks and blobs.
4
Spacing and kerning
Every pair of letters is spaced by eye at text and display sizes. This takes longer than drawing.
5
Testing in use
Proofs go to newsrooms, sign makers and designers we trust. Their complaints become fixes.
6
Release
One variable file, named static styles, a specimen and a trial. Updates stay free for everyone who bought.
We also draw typefaces for one client at a time.
Custom work runs from adjusting one of our families for a brand to drawing a new one from scratch. Projects take three to nine months.