Typesay

A font marketplace built around how people actually look for type: describe a feeling, upload an image, or name a font you already like.

Typesay, in action.

A fast, searchable font catalogue with designer pages, collections, comparisons and clear licensing.

heytypesay.com

Finding the right font should not need the right words.

Most font sites expect you to know a name or a category. Typesay lets you search the way designers think: by mood, by a picture of what you want, or by a font you already love, then licence it in a few clicks.

Project factsThe brief
TeamIkonik Studio, in-house
PlatformNext.js with Postgres
FocusSearch, catalogue, designer sales
TypeStudio product

Three ways to search.

Each one answers a different moment in a design project.

Describe it

Type a feeling like "warm and trustworthy" or "loud poster" and get matching fonts, powered by text embeddings rather than tags alone.

Show it

Upload a screenshot or photo of lettering you like. The text is read from the image and matched against the catalogue.

Name it

Enter a font you already know and see similar alternatives, with side-by-side comparison before you choose.

A marketplace, not just a list.

Built as a custom Next.js application so search, licensing and designer tools all work as one product.

01

Catalogue &
previews

Fonts are parsed and previewed in the browser, with collections, categories and moods to browse.

02

Smart
search

Description, image and similar-font search, backed by embeddings and in-browser text recognition.

03

Designer
sales

Designer profiles, author terms and a checkout so type designers can sell their own work.

04

Clear
licensing

Plain-language licensing, refunds and DMCA pages so buyers know exactly what they get.

Built with the right tools.

A typed, modern stack with the search smarts running close to the data.

FrameworkNext.jsUIReactDatabasePostgreSQLORMDrizzleSearchTransformers embeddingsImagesTesseract text recognitionFontsFontkit parsingPreviewsCanvas rendering

More recent work.

Other projects from the studio.

Want results like Typesay? Let’s talk.

The same team that built Typesay works on every project. Tell us what you need and we will show you how we would approach it.

  1. Send a briefA few lines on what you need is enough to start.
  2. A short callWe ask the right questions and talk through options.
  3. Fixed quote in 24hScope, price and timeline in writing. No surprises.