The Lost Type Co-Op is a group of typographers who sell their fonts directly to the customer through their web site, using a pay what you want model. The emphasis is on retro and industrial fonts and typefaces based on mid-twentieth century signage, and they’re awfully nice.
So nice that I’d like them all, in fact.
In most cases, you pay whatever you like for an unrestricted license. In a few cases there are tiers: so much for personal use, so much for commercial use. Licenses for web use as a font-face vary from one to another and are indicated by a distinctive graphic. Lost Type itself just passes the money on to the individual typographers; it doesn’t make any money on its own behalf.
I ran across their site while following a Twitter link that mentioned my Pulp-O-Mizer, and I stayed because, well, I couldn’t help it. There’s some really lovely work here, and the stories behind some of these faces are pretty interesting, too: for example, how a walk through San Francisco’s Mission District led to the creation of Mission Gothic.
