Commercial Type's new Showcase site is a font of typographic joy

There’s something about the painstaking perfectionism of type design that doesn’t scream fun and frolics, but Commercial Type’s new webfont showcase is ready to prove me wrong. The New York and London based type studio run by Christian Schwartz and Paul Barnes is widely-regarded as one of the best around, but the pair have struggled sometimes to communicate the personality of their fonts. Enter the Commercial Type Showcase which they built with Wael Morcos to show off the lighter side of 16 of their creations by way of 16 microsites, ranging from poetry and poster generators to a train schedule board and even a digital therapist.

Christian told us: “Since we released our webfonts to the public in May 2013, the bestsellers by a wide margin have been Atlas Grotesk and Graphik. While we are proud of these typefaces, we feel that they are only an incremental improvement over web standard fonts, and not necessarily helping to push forward new aesthetic possibilities.

“This showcase came about because we wanted to see how typefaces like Druk and Gabriello with more assertive personalities, could be used on the web, while also exploring more imaginative uses of workhorses like Publico and Lyon.

“The discussion around webfonts has been dominated by font formats, hinting, licensing models, and the inconsistencies between different browsers. We wanted to assert that there can be joy in type on the web too.”

It’s hard to explain how great this is really so best head over to the site yourself and have a play around.