Schick Toikka

Not every type foundry needs hundreds of fonts to be worth your time. Schick Toikka has been doing it the slow, deliberate way since 2010, when Florian Schick and Lauri Toikka graduated from the type media program at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague and set up shop between Berlin and Helsinki. The library is compact by design, but what’s there is genuinely well-crafted. Each typeface comes with multiple subfamilies and a serious range of styles, so you’re not buying a single font and running out of road. Noe alone ships across three subfamilies and 44 styles, covering everything from punchy display work to refined body copy.

The fonts themselves have serious pedigree. Noe Display has been spotted in Esquire, The Atlantic, the New York Times and MoMA. Dia brings warmth and personality to the grotesque tradition without getting cute about it. Chap was originally designed for the Finnish Culture Institute in New York and has since found a life well beyond that brief. Scto Grotesk is Schick Toikka’s take on the neo-grotesque, executed with the kind of restraint that only comes from designers who really know the genre. Beyond retail fonts, Schick Toikka also offers custom typeface design services, working with organizations of all sizes.

The pricing sits at the premium end of the independent foundry spectrum, which is fair given the craft level involved. The good news is that free trials are available across the library, so you can put a face through its paces in your actual work before spending anything. The selection won’t satisfy everyone. If you need a broad library with options across every style and genre, Schick Toikka isn’t that place. But if you want type that’s been thought through properly, this is a foundry that rewards the time you put into it.