August Type Foundry
An independent type foundry from Tokyo, established in 2026. We design retail families and bespoke type for people who treat letterforms as infrastructure — the quiet medium that carries everything else.
A communal foundry
We work by mingling — histories, cultures, and eras that were never meant to meet. We take forms from different times and disciplines, weigh their context and intent, and reshape them through a contemporary eye. For us, type design is continuity rather than rupture: every typeface we draw is in conversation with the ones that came before it, and we credit those debts openly in the fonts we ship.
Steiner — the medium meaning passes through
Our first release, Steiner, is a twelve-weight humanist sans-serif drawn in Tokyo. Its name reaches back to the classical word for the upper air — the breath of the cosmos, the medium through which light and form were once thought to travel. Rudolf Steiner used the same idea to describe the formative force that gives shape before shape is seen.
That felt like the right name for a typeface, because a typeface is never the meaning itself. It is the medium meaning passes through — the thing you are not supposed to notice, doing the quiet work of carrying a thought from one mind to another.
Lineage
Steiner stands beside Apercu, but its roots run deeper. They reach through Edward Johnston's 1916 alphabet for the London Underground, through Gill Sans and Neuzeit, and through Otl Aicher's Rotis, drawn at the Ulm School of Design in 1988. Where Apercu draws on Franklin Gothic, Steiner draws on Rotis — seventy years of humanist sans-serif tradition folded into a single, contemporary voice. Geometric in skeleton, modulated in breath, humanist in spirit.
gQ
Alongside Steiner we are developing gQ, the latest cut of Mokuseki Sans — a neo-humanist sans of our own, with a distinct set of signature letterforms. It debuts in 2026 and will grow into a full variable family in step with the foundry.
How we draw
We ship spacing tight by default. A face set loose can never be tightened back, but a face set tight leaves the operator room to breathe. Constraint, we believe, is what generates the freedom of use. We keep the same discipline in the catalogue itself — a small, considered library rather than a sprawling one — so that every release stays measured and intentional.
How we release
Variable font first, sold as a family. Licences are perpetual: pay once, use forever, with no subscription. Desktop, Web, App and Books licences are available, and bespoke commissions — a proprietary typeface tuned to a single identity — sit alongside the retail library.
Contact
For licensing, custom commissions, or anything else, write to hi@august.tf. We are based in Tokyo, Japan.