As a child, Mattox Shuler spent much of his time playing in forts. Those secret (and sometimes not-so-secret) hideaways were places full of unlimited possibilities for adventure. Fort building seems an innate characteristic of the universal youth experience, an activity that most of us remember fondly, even when we got into trouble for using our mom’s favorite afghan. You know, the one that grandma crocheted by hand. It was only when we became grown-ups that we realized those gaping holes were not so easily repaired.
As an adult in Athens, Georgia, Mattox has created a font foundry that reflects his love for artistry and the imagined escapades of his youth. Pairing the nostalgia of his past with inspiration from his present, what started as little more than a side-project in type design would eventually become Fort Foundry.
Fort Foundry has produced a striking array of industrial and commercial type designs.
Gin is a bold, decorative serif font imbued with old-fashioned charm. Like a dusty bottle of spirits in a long-forgotten saloon, the Gin font family is a designer’s diamond hidden in the rough. Featuring stylistic alternatives, Gin offers four distinct font sets with companion obliques.
Gin Regular is the standard letter design with clean, sharpened outlines for crisp letter displays. Gin Rough is a little weathered and worn around the edges, reminiscent of torn paper and tattered labels. Gin Round offers a softer option with smoothed borders for applications that require a more subdued touch. Gin Lines is a letter set incorporating thin, angled lines to create a letterform that’s both solid and transparent, a unique balance of substantial character with threadbare weight.
Gin is an ideal font family for vintage-inspired posters, headlines, logos, and advertisements.
Colt presents wide letterforms with a decidedly 1960s vibe. Fans of retro advertisements will love the nostalgia of the Colt font family. Available in six weights ranging from Light to Black, designers have a variety of composition options at their disposal. Colt can easily stand alone as the predominant letterform in a display, particularly when Colt Demi, Colt Bold, or Colt Black are in use. Colt also serves well as an accompaniment to a main attraction, as Colt Light, Colt, and Colt Medium are considerably lighter in weight than their heavier brothers. The entire Colt family offers a well-balanced assortment of type designs for print and digital applications that demand a masculine, retro appeal.
Factoria is a modern, industrial serif typeface. Eight weights with companion italics give designers an abundance of choice for headline, editorial, and magazine applications, as well as logo design and poster layouts. The geometric shapes of Factoria pay homage to current and futuristic technological advances, making it a particularly excellent option for work that’s centered around the themes of computers, math, or science. Factoria offers a number of OpenType features to assist in these types of designs, including numerators and denominators, fractions, subscripts, superscripts, and tabular figures.
Industry is sort of like Factoria’s great-uncle, or at the very least, its much older brother. Featuring seven weights with companion italics, Industry is a mechanical, sans serif typeface inspired by futuristic and vintage technologies in equal measure. Like Factoria, Industry offers a variety of OpenType features for applications that require fractions, numerators and denominators, tabular figures, subscripts, and superscripts. Ideal for themes of science, chemistry, mathematics, and technology, Industry pairs well with Factoria in logo designs and other graphic layouts.
Whether a designer is looking for a sleek, industrial font or a well-worn, vintage type design, Fort Foundry offers a diverse body of work to accommodate a variety of applications. For more information about Fort Foundry or our Font Licenses, please contact us.
