Justseeds is a fabulous assortment of printmakers, illustrators, designers and hand-drawn/original type is often a major part of our process. With the Justseeds Open Type Project, I hoped to capture some of the very inventive ways that members of Justseeds approached letterforms and also wanted to explore the lexicon of historical leftist and liberatory type design.

Last week we published our 20th pack of fonts and our 50th font for the Justseeds Open Type Project. Figuring out digital type production was a long-time curiosity and itch, and I finally took the dive in five years ago. I made a couple of my own fonts and started working on fonts by other Justseeds members (Josh MacPhee, Kill Joy, and Chris Stain) and it took off from there. My approach to this project has definitely been informed by a DIY ethos and I’ve been learning as I go. The fonts are, hopefully, getting more sophisticated as the project has grown. I’ve also been slowly going back through old published fonts to work on lingering balance, spacing, and kerning issues while also adding diacritics for increased language support.

So, this is a quick post celebrating 5 years/20 packs/50 fonts, with a somewhat random selection of the wide and varied places that these fonts have been used (mostly from saved screenshots on my phone-I’ve done my best with crediting!). A special shout out to haley brown’s recent Nurturing Disabled Futures series, it was a real treat to see the font Rosa Blanca used prominently in this project with its powerful pairing of illustration, design, and message.

All fonts are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA). This Creative Commons license means that these fonts can be used, shared, and adapted; attributed when appropriate; and any adaptations must fall under the same license. This license enables reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms.

These fonts can be used for activist projects of all sorts. These fonts can also be used for liberatory social and cultural productions. These fonts are not for sale and must be shared freely.

Justseeds Opens Type Project fonts are free! If you use fonts from the Justseeds Open Type Project and would like to donate, any donated money will go to the Justseeds general project fund.  These donations help us fund art donations to political groups that are used for benefits and fundraisers, as well as special projects & site specific actions by Justseeds members and allied organizations. Any amount is appreciated. PayPal link here.

If you have questions about using a font please contact us at graphics@justseeds.org.