600 years of typography in 23 cards

4 min readJul 26, 2017

Managing a font rental web-service, I often deal with creating various font collections. Usually I create them based on demand analysis, but sometimes users ask for a font set of a certain size for a certain purpose. Having created several collections on demand, I consider this process as quite an interesting experience.

One of the most exciting and difficult collections I’ve created was a font set for “Memory game” by Macosh Design. It is an educational board game for all ages, where players are supposed to turn cards with different pictures over, in order to find duplicates.

The collection for “Memory FONT” must have met a bunch of requirements:

All the 23 fonts must have obvious differences that are noticeable not only for designers, but even for children.
In order to increase the educability, it is necessary to present all the main artistic styles of the European civilization.
Fonts should evoke the most vivid associations and have different kinds of mood, age, gender, national coloring.
The collection should contain new fonts as well as old well-known fonts, for example Futura.
As a co-publisher of this board game, I could have only use Rentafont fonts with Cyrillic and Latin support that are available for rent. And use the works of as many foundries as possible.

Naturally, I couldn’t keep that many features in my head. For this reason, I created a table of 23 cells and began to fill it with the most important features of the fonts, making sure that each feature was represented as good as possible, without any kind of preponderating.

When all the features were set, I used the Rentafont search to find fonts for each line. For example, Orchidea Pro Medium (highlighted font) was found by this query. I was saving the fonts one by one to a new Project in my Rentafont account, and then I rented them so that I could use them in the layout of the game.

Thus, on 23 cards there were collected the fonts, simultaneously representing about 100 different features: old-style and modern serifs, humanist and geometric sans serifs, upright and italic variants, thin and bold weights. Also there are calligraphic, drawn, modular fonts of different moods and styles: American, German, French, Ukrainian, as well as ancient, classical, modern, futuristic, female and male, childish and mature, etc.

That’s how the “Memory FONT” board game looks in action: