Website updates: trial fonts, discounts, cart, and obnoxious colors

Welcome to the new Okay Type website. I soft launched this on February 29th, 2024. After a year or two of tweaks, updates, and bug fixes I guess it’s time to announce the update and explain what’s new.

A new font, Euchre

Let’s get this out of the way. I recently released a new font, Euchre. It’s a humanist sans with a little bit of contrast and a ton of nice typographic features. It’s a good workhorse and is especially good as a text face. It even won a bunch of awards. Check out the Euchre specimen and grab the free trial versions.

That's right, I now offer trial fonts

Now you can test Okay Type fonts in the comfort of your own studio. Create mockups and get approval before you purchase a license. The trial fonts contain every style of every family. They include both desktop (.otf) and web (.woff2) formats. While they are subset, they do contain some OpenType features essential to evaluating the suitability of a font for text, including lining numbers (lnum), ligatures (liga), and contextual alternates (calt).

For families that have ✨ variable fonts ✨, like Okay and Euchre, there are even trial versions of the variable font files. They have the full designspace with every axis, but a the same truncated character set mentioned above.

Because trial fonts are new to me, I’m asking for an email address. Partly because you need to agree to the simple trial font EULA, but mostly I want to see if any of these ever actually turn into sales. Here's the deal though: I won’t email you unless it’s really important. No nagging follow-ups. No marketing spam. If you want those you can opt in to the Okay Type mailing list (which operates under a similar “I don't really want to email you” policy). Get them here.

Oh, and please leave a note. It’s really useful to hear about the projects everyone is working on.

About the obnoxious colors

At some point in developing this site, I got sick of working in black and white and wrote a little Javascript to pick random colors. It was meant to be temporary experiment. Instead I became obsessed. The randomness was too much fun. I tried to convince myself to do something more tasteful, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it (also, white text on a black background is kind of cheating, imo, even bad fonts look pretty good that way).

I've tried to dial it back in places where reading is important, like font licenses and blog entries, but sometimes it’s all too much, especially if you have any kind of color sensitivity. Sorry. I've been working on a more accessible “reader” theme but haven’t been satisfied enough to launch it. If something really is too hard to read, you can press backslash (\) to shuffle the colors. And if you’re bored, keep pressing it to create a little disco party.

New checkout, new discounts, shareable carts

Perhaps the biggest backend update is the new cart system. I've opted not to increase prices (no promises about the future—waiting to see just how expensive groceries get). Actually, I did the opposite, I introduced a few new discounts: 1) When buying loose styles, if you pick a roman and italic pair (e.g. Euchre Light and Euchre Light Italic), the italic style will be 50% off, and 2) When buying loose styles and subfamilies, the prices will never exceed the price of the full family.

I also introduced a couple of features to make it easier to license fonts when working with other people. You can get a sharable link to a cart to send to your client or boss— just go to the checkout page and click “Share Cart” to get the URL. You can also skip that step and purchase a license directly on behalf of your client—just go to the checkout and click “I am purchasing this for: ✔︎ Someone else”. You’ll need to provide their information and agree to the EULA on their behalf (the onus is on you send them the EULA and get their permission beforehand). Since it’s your client, in the event of any updates or issues I'll always contact you first.

A new FAQ

Even though no one seems to AQ anymore, I updated my FAQ. Maybe it’s helpful? Oh, maybe it actually is helpful and that’s why no one asks questions? I dunno. Anyway, if you have any questions that aren’t on there, or you’re just too lazy to read, you can always just email me.

More soon

I'll have another update soon to outline some other updates to the site including: redesigned font pages, customizable font downloads, and a new feed of random sketches. ✌️