Who makes this, and why
I'm Dominik Heilig, a comic artist and illustrator in Berlin. I have been drawing since the DIY magazine days of the nineties, worked as a storyboarder and animator, coloured a Russian sci-fi comic for Art Lebedev Studio in Moscow, and published two books with Jaja Verlag — KAZKA and the documentary graphic novel God Bless India. Since 2012 I have helped run Comic Invasion Berlin, an independent comic festival: design, curation, fundraising, and the parts nobody puts on a poster.
Why letters
Comics are where I got interested in type. In a comic, lettering is not decoration — it carries the voice. A shout drawn differently is a different shout. You spend years drawing the same alphabet by hand, over and over, in a style that has to stay recognisably yours across a hundred and seventy pages. At some point the letters get as interesting as the panels.
Where this came from
Fontane started at Comic Invasion Berlin, in the comic font workshops I run there. People draw their own alphabet in an afternoon — that part works, and it is a good afternoon. Then comes the wall: turning drawn letters into a font you can actually type with means professional type tools, built by and for people who make typefaces for a living. Fair enough for them. Wrong tool for someone who wanted a font for their own comic.
So I built the one I was missing. For me, and for people who are not type nerds — who need a font once in a while, but then need it properly: with accents, punctuation, more than one script, ligatures and alternates so the same letter isn't stamped identically across a page. The things that decide whether a font is usable or a toy. That is the whole idea: the depth of a real type tool, without requiring you to become a type designer first.
Where it stands
It is in beta and free, and it is a side project — I work part time and this happens in the gaps. That is also why it is honest about what it can't do yet: see Features for what exists today, and the Lexicon if a word here was new to you. Fonts you draw are yours — the licence says so in one sentence.
If you make something with it, or it fails you somewhere, I would like to hear about it: dominik@aisu.studio. More of my work is at aisu.studio.