The owners of your favorite fonts – Garamond, Times New Roman, Georgia – charge businesses who use their font on their website, app, and advertisements.

 

Instead of paying millions of dollars for licenses, tech companies are starting to design their own fonts.

 

Airbnb launched their own font earlier this week: Airbnb Cereal, in homage of the Obama and McCain themed cereal boxes that co-founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia sold in order to bootstrap Airbnb.

 

It's free for anyone to download: try it out now. 😋

 

Airbnb isn't alone: Netflix launched Netflix Sans earlier this year, and both Apple and Samsung use custom default fonts.

 

You can now design your own font too:

 

📝 Fontself lets you design custom fonts in Photoshop.

✍️ Calligraphr converts your handwriting into a font.

🖋️ FontJoy generates smart font pairings in one click.

 

And of another font catches your fancy, use WhatTheFont to snap a pic and it’ll find the closest match. It’s like Shazam for typography nerds. 🤓