Kestrel had eleven families out and a shop running on an off-the-shelf ecommerce theme. Every family opened on a product card: the name, a price, a weight dropdown, and a 240-pixel image of the word Kestrel set in the lightest cut they made. The real specimens were PDFs, two clicks further in. People were being asked for £340 on the strength of a picture smaller than a business card.

The PDF had to go

We deleted the product page and made the specimen do its work. A family now opens full-bleed at 180pt in an editable field, with a slider that runs from 8 to 400 and a paragraph rig setting the same passage at 9, 11 and 14pt, so the rendering at body sizes is visible before anyone pays. Licence tiers sit in a rail on the right and follow you down. Buying happens where you are already looking.

Licence revenue came in at 2.4x the previous year, though nineteen families released in the same period account for some of that. The figure we trust more is time on a family page, up from forty seconds to just over four minutes, with refund requests for the wrong weight down to two across the year.

The waterfall we cut

Our first build rendered every weight of a family at once, twenty-two rows deep. It took nine seconds to paint on a mid-range Android and Ada, who runs the foundry, was too polite to say so for a fortnight. We spent that fortnight optimising before admitting we had built it to impress other type designers. Three weights now, chosen by whoever drew the thing.