Koto opened a type foundry and priced the font licence by company size

Koto opened a type foundry this week. It's called CcType, the first release is a family named CcTimeline, and the licence is the part worth reading twice: one price based on your company size, covering the website and the branding and anything else you do with it. No renewal fees. Styles start at £60.

Koto is the London agency behind brand work for Amazon, Google, Netflix and WhatsApp. CcType is the first product it has put its own name on rather than a client's. Jowey Roden, co-founder and chief creative officer, gave Creative Boom the reasoning in one line: "The world is deserving of better design, and we have a responsibility to deliver on that, even if it's in a minimal or marginal way."

Font licensing priced by headcount

Font licensing usually asks you to count things. Pageviews for the web licence, seats for the desktop one, a separate title-by-title deal if it goes in an app. CcType asks one question: how big is your company. Buy at your tier and use it wherever you want. The foundry's two conditions are that you keep the files behind standard security, and that you upgrade if your team grows into a larger tier.

For a working product designer that changes a small, annoying thing. The brand font stops being a question for legal every time it moves surface. Trials are free and come with a cut-down character set, fine for mockups and pitch decks, off-limits for anything live.

CcTimeline has a contrast axis

The first family is a variable font with two axes, weight and contrast, split into three subfamilies (CC Timeline, CC Timeline Mid, CC Timeline High) and 18 styles. Koto says it drew on three eras of typesetting: metal, phototype, and digital.

The contrast axis is the decision a designer would notice. Contrast is normally baked in when you pick the family, so a brand that wants a delicate editorial voice and a heavy interface voice buys twice. Here it slides. The site's hero argues this without a spec table: the word "Timeline" repeats down the page, each pass heavier and higher-contrast than the last, so you watch the axis travel.

The specimen is built for people who check

The glyph view flips to black and puts a single letter on its metrics, with the numbers in the margin. Ascender 1000, cap height 700, x-height 540, baseline 0, descender -300. Pick any character and it names the Unicode point beside it. The coverage is on show too: Latin Extended-B, IPA extensions, combining diacriticals, a Thai baht sign.

There's a live type tester with size, letter spacing and line height, plus toggles for the OpenType features. It's the behaviour of a foundry that expects buyers to interrogate the thing before paying, and it's a good sign.

Why an agency is selling type

Koto's own answer, on the site, is that it comes to type from the far end of the work. It has spent years watching bespoke typefaces get used at billboard size and at 12px inside a product, and it's selling type "designed from the reality of how brands operate in 2026". The pitch is that the rigour behind a custom typeface for a global brand can go to a business of any size, for £60 a style.

The origin story is more ordinary, and more believable. "We kept running into the same frustrations," the foundry says. "Couldn't find a serif with enough weight range."

Koto has stepped outside client work before. It has put custom fonts on Google Fonts for Polkadot, Faculty and Stack Overflow, and it launched Seasoned, a free education hub, in 2025. CcType is the version with a price on it. Whether one family and a simpler licence is enough to pull anyone away from the foundries they already buy from, the next few releases will say.