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mass-driver.com
Mass-Driver
@mass-driver.com
920 followers 200 following 180 posts
Independent foundry based in The Hague. We make typefaces that are sensitive to the past, but designed for the present.

https://mass-driver.com

Posts by Rutherford Craze, [type]founder.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Mass-Driver
mass-driver.com
Available now: MD Thermochrome v0.4 adds over 100 new icons to the typeface, all of which respond to weight and italic angle just like every other glyph. Legibility not guaranteed

www.futurefonts.com/mass-driver/...
A handful of key glyphs (lowercase a, asterisk, ampersand, capital R, superscript 1, percent sign) from MD Thermochrome, showing the visual language of the typeface. It’s a dotmatrix-style typeface made from circles and rounded horizontal lines, which grow and shrink to form the multiple weights. A selection of icons from the typeface, highlighted in red, interspersed with words describing them (or described by them) in white.
November 17, 2025 at 7:21 PM
mass-driver.com
Available now: MD Thermochrome v0.4 adds over 100 new icons to the typeface, all of which respond to weight and italic angle just like every other glyph. Legibility not guaranteed

www.futurefonts.com/mass-driver/...
A handful of key glyphs (lowercase a, asterisk, ampersand, capital R, superscript 1, percent sign) from MD Thermochrome, showing the visual language of the typeface. It’s a dotmatrix-style typeface made from circles and rounded horizontal lines, which grow and shrink to form the multiple weights. A selection of icons from the typeface, highlighted in red, interspersed with words describing them (or described by them) in white.
November 17, 2025 at 7:21 PM
mass-driver.com
The v0.4 update for MD Thermochrome is finally ready, and it’ll ship later today!

This version of the typeface includes 100+ new icons for UI design, wayfinding, and more.

There’s a few more hours to get it at the current price, with lifetime updates included:
www.futurefonts.com/mass-driver/...
A grid of 133 icons, symbols and arrows, from the upcoming V0.4 release of MD Thermochrome. Among them are icons for weather conditions, arrival/departures signs, documents, playing card suits, media controls, and common UI symbols.
November 17, 2025 at 11:20 AM
mass-driver.com
Made the call last week to push our late 2025 release to early 2026. The delay might be disappointing, but I feel extremely fortunate that we can take as much time as this project needs.

In the meantime, here’s a preview of something else I’ve been working on: MD Thermochrome icons
Sample text with some icons set in MD Thermochrome. It’s a dot-matrix–inspired typeface constructed from circles and rounded horizontal lines, and the icons are rendered in the same style.
October 29, 2025 at 11:08 AM
mass-driver.com
A small update: if you’re buying fonts via our website, there’s now an option to apply a 50% student discount without needing to contact us.

(You can always use our trial fonts in class without paying anything — this is only for commercial projects, published websites, etc.)

mass-driver.com
Screenshot of a section of the checkout page on our foundry website, showing a checkbox marked ‘Licensee is a student’ (currently selected). The line below reads, ‘50% off. Student licenses remain valid after you graduate.’
October 7, 2025 at 9:56 AM
mass-driver.com
Super nice example of MD Nichrome in use, by Malcontenti Studio for Yatasto, a bar/pizzeria in Buenos Aires.

(I love seeing projects like this!)

Via @fontsinuse.com: fontsinuse.com/uses/71993/y...
Candid-style photo of a person’s upper back, showing the design on their shirt. They’re in a tiled space, presumably a commercial kitchen. Their shirt is white, with text and an illustration in black, red and sky blue: the illustration is of a racehorse, with the logo of ‘Yatasto’ bar & pizzeria underneath. The word ‘Yatasto’ is set in red MD Nichrome Ultra, with ‘Bar’ above and ‘Pizzeria’ below in Cooper Nouveau. A mockup of paper sheets (presumably to be used as fast food wrappers) with a repeating design tiled across them. The design features the same Yatasto logo and racehorse illustration as the shirt (with some additional supporting text), in a warm white colour on red paper, and the inverse, red on warm white paper.
September 24, 2025 at 12:04 PM
Reposted by Mass-Driver
symbo1ics.bsky.social
Typofonderie's gorgeous Caslonian M type tester: "Turn on replies, coward" in Light, Light Italic, and Regular weights
September 18, 2025 at 6:47 PM
mass-driver.com
For years, @matthewsmith.website’s typefoundry.directory has been my favourite place to discover new, independent type foundries.

This summer Matthew released a huge update to the site, and also (finally!) let me support his efforts with a sponsorship — this month, the nameplate is set in MD Lórien
Screenshot of the new Type Foundry Directory main page, showing the name “Type Foundry Directory” (very large, set in MD Lórien Italic), and the first couple of foundry listings.
September 3, 2025 at 10:01 AM
mass-driver.com
Happy to have been able to contribute some thoughts to @goodspeed.bsky.social’s latest piece for @its-nice-that.bsky.social.

It’s great to see an article on design ethics consider type and UX, which generally don’t follow the typical client–agency model.

www.itsnicethat.com/features/is-...
The Good, the Bad, and the Iffy: is there such a thing as an ethical designer?
Designers from Pentagram, Koto, Creech, and more talk candidly about the murky waters of client selection, the logistics and risks of rejecting work on moral grounds, and how to keep afloat without lo...
www.itsnicethat.com
September 2, 2025 at 8:14 AM
mass-driver.com
A small update on web fonts: from today, we’re no longer including the .woff format by default, since browser support for .woff2 is virtually identical (96% vs 96.7%).

We’ll continue to provide them on request for any users who need them.
September 1, 2025 at 8:38 AM
mass-driver.com
About a month ago this arrived at the studio, and I *adore* it.

Long Way Home is a book on the work of Belarusian artist Masha Maroz. Its titles are set in MD Thermochrome, which doesn’t (yet) support Cyrillic — so the designers made their own.

Via @fontsinuse.com: fontsinuse.com/uses/69970/l...
Scan of the contents page of Long Way Home. Section titles are set in slightly tracked all-caps MD Thermochrome, in English on the verso page and Belarusian on the recto. The paper is off-white, with a rich yellow gradient towards the spine. Small supplementary text is in wide-tracked Roboto, also in all caps. Scan of an article title page from the book. On the verso page is a large image of a tree trunk standing before a snowy woodland, wrapped in brightly-coloured ribbons. The book title is written in three languages (English, French and Belarusian) vertically along the spine, in all-caps MD Thermochrome. On the recto page is the title and opening paragraphs of an interview. The title is also in all-caps Thermochrome, with the body text, page numbers, and a note stating the page number of the English translation all in Roboto.
August 14, 2025 at 8:31 AM
Reposted by Mass-Driver
symbo1ics.bsky.social
A lovely historical discussion of some of my favourite, and the oldest, typeface families, by @mass-driver.com; including many beautiful page images.

mass-driver.com/article/md-l...

#typography
MD Lórien: a Parallel to Caslon
mass-driver.com
August 5, 2025 at 5:33 PM
mass-driver.com
Another 10/10 entry in Figma’s portfolio of features which look great but will make your web developer cry
figma.com Figma @figma.com · Jul 17
Let’s touch glass
July 17, 2025 at 5:43 PM
mass-driver.com
Take Back Mokum: a collection of essays, interviews, illustrations and more, around the theme of squatting and housing in Amsterdam.

The first (& I hope not the last!) book set in my typeface, MD Lórien.

Via @fontsinuse.com: fontsinuse.com/uses/67027/t...
Typeface: mass-driver.com/typefaces/md...
Front cover of a paperback book, titled Take Back Mokum: Squatting and the Housing Struggle in Amsterdam. White text in MD Lórien on a purple background, with rough (linocut?) illustrations of a mix of domestic and municipal objects (e.g. a cooking pot, cargo bike, bar stools, angle grinder). Closeup of a page from the book, showing a section title and opening paragraph. All the text, again, is in MD Lórien. Layout & typography by Jan Egbers (janegbers.info).
July 9, 2025 at 9:08 AM
mass-driver.com
In love with the typesetting on these posters, too

(mass-driver.com/typefaces/md...)
Poster for Aaron Parks’ summer 2025 tour. Pastel lavender and yellow, with an abstract circular design and text set in MD Nichrome. Poster for Aaron Parks’ May 2025 tour. A moody, dark blue abstract design based around concentric circles, similar to the album artwork (quoted). White all-caps text is overlaid in two weights of MD Nichrome.
July 3, 2025 at 11:12 AM
Reposted by Mass-Driver
fontstand.com
This is the final week of collecting responses regarding font users’ opinions on the current state of font licensing. The survey will close on Sunday 6 July at midnight CEST. Once the data has been analysed, we will share the findings publicly. Complete the survey today: fontstand.com/survey
June 30, 2025 at 1:17 PM
mass-driver.com
MD Thermochrome v0.3 is now available! This update adds 33 new styles, for a total of 40 — including a new Medium weight and 4 sets of italics.

(Also included are arrows, super & subscript, and a fractions OpenType feature)

www.future-fonts.com/mass-driver/...
Overview of the 8 weights in MD Thermochrome 0.3 (Thin, Light, Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold, Black & Ultra). The typeface itself is a tightly-spaced, dot-matrix–inspired design, where horizontally adjacent dots merge into lines. Composition showing all 5 italic variants arranged in a wave (each line of text is incrementally more or less slanted than the previous).
June 25, 2025 at 2:40 PM
mass-driver.com
The next update to MD Thermochrome will be out tomorrow, adding 33 (!) new styles: a new Medium weight, plus 4 sets of italics.

As always with Future Fonts releases, the price will increase for new buyers, but existing customers get all updates for free

www.future-fonts.com/mass-driver/...
An overview showing all 40 styles of MD Thermochrome v0.3. Eight weights from Thin to Ultra (Medium is new in this update), all of which are available in 5 different slants: Reclined, Retalic, upright, Italic and Inclined.
June 24, 2025 at 8:38 AM
mass-driver.com
What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders?

Fonts regularly take multiple years to make, and developing a small typeface family can easily cost $50k.
brianlarossa.com Brian LaRossa @brianlarossa.com · Jun 18
What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders?

Despite the technological revolution the book business is healthy and generally stable. People still buy A LOT of books.
alana-m-vincent.net V is for תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ @alana-m-vincent.net · Jun 17
What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders?

We’re really not clear on what religion IS. At all.
June 18, 2025 at 11:06 AM
mass-driver.com
The type distributor (and organiser of my favourite typography conference), @fontstand.com, is restructuring into a cooperative.

It’s hard to overstate how valuable this could be, for foundries, customers, and the health of the whole industry. A font platform owned by independent foundries!
June 12, 2025 at 11:44 AM
mass-driver.com
Maybe you’ve heard: every font is free! Since fonts aren’t subject to copyright, you can legally ‘pirate’ them if you use a specific loophole!

...except that’s not really true. I’ve seen this claim repeated quite a lot recently, and it’s missing some pretty important nuance.

🧵 A thread:
Alphabet and numbers in a monospaced typeface (MD System Mono, specifically), arranged in a grid. In the bottom row, ‘$0’ (zero dollars) is highlighted in bright red.
June 5, 2025 at 5:35 PM
mass-driver.com
Via @fontsinuse.com: MD Nichrome in use for Révéler l’impact, an exhibition on the impacts of mining and mineral extraction.

More info: fontsinuse.com/uses/68263/r...
Typeface: mass-driver.com/typefaces/md...
Poster board advertising Révéler l’impact, an exhibition on the impact of mining and mineral extraction. The title and supporting text are set in MD Nichrome (with a nice use of the alternate tabular numbers at the bottom), weaving between organic-looking layers of abstracted purple, green and silver textures.
June 3, 2025 at 4:09 PM
mass-driver.com
Back in 2023, we made a custom typeface for Bonnaroo festival — MD Bonnachrome is still front and centre for the 2025 event (and I’m still getting excited every time a new poster drops).

The case study: mass-driver.com/custom/bonna...
The festival: www.bonnaroo.com
Poster for “Remi Wolf’s Insanely Fire 1970s Pool Party Superjam”, an event scheduled as part of Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival 2025. Expertly-typeset (seriously, their design team is phenomenal) all caps bold type with a 1970s vibe. Beneath the text block is a grainy, colourful, psychedelic illustration of a pool with an inflatable flamingo and green orbs. Lineup poster for Bonnaroo’s ‘Who Stage’. Text in the same typeface and style (MD Bonnachrome, a custom design based on MD Nichrome) sits on a textured background of stars.
May 21, 2025 at 7:38 PM
mass-driver.com
I’m really happy to see MD Lórien used for Robin Sloan’s recent zine, The Secret Playbook (on strategies for artists to counter AI models) — and in great company, next to DJR’s exceptional Clavichord!

www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/...
Closeup of the cover page of Robin Sloan’s zine, ‘The Secret Playbook’. A highly textured Risograph print of a greyscale photo, with ornate, condensed blackletter caps (Clavichord, from DJR) overlaid in red ink. Closeup of the top corner of the first page (I’m trying to keep the text secret!). ‘The Secret Playbook’ is visible, all caps in a wide sans-serif, with body text below it set in MD Lórien.
May 19, 2025 at 2:11 PM
mass-driver.com
This year I had the privilege of being on the type design jury for the Type Directors Club TDC71 awards. It was difficult keeping quiet about some of these entries, but the winners have now been announced — check them out!

tdc.org/winner-archi...
TDC71 WINNERS HAVE BEEN ANNOUNCED - Type Directors Club
tdc.org
April 29, 2025 at 3:39 PM