Franz Hoffman is a designer-turned-entrepreneur and cofounder of Fontself, which brings easy type-making capabilities into the hands of all creatives.
Fontself was born from his belief that typography is a powerful medium that should be democratized, like photo & video editing. As a creative who was frustrated by the complexity of typographic tools, Franz started an independent research project in 2005 to explore how modern software and new graphic technologies could better serve the needs of other designers.
As fierce believers in innovative type technologies, Franz & his cofounder Mohamed Ghenania have been instrumental in the emerging trend of color fonts. Fontself was behind the success of top-selling hand brush fonts, ignited the first wave of color fonts on the market, and published Gilbert, a tribute chromatic font to the rainbow flag creator, which also became the very first third-party color font released on Adobe Fonts.
Franz can sometimes be found poking at big tech companies to advocate for more user-friendly type experiences.