Clients stopped caring about the late nights, the obsession, or the human soul poured into a design. They just want the cheapest, fastest output possible. And man, that realization hits hard. It’s a toxic mix of burnout, grief, and pure helplessness. You feel like your craft is being completely devalued, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. You feel totally obsolete and ready to throw your mouse out the window.

The Turning Point: If It Has No Value, Let’s Make It Worthless

Sitting in that heavy fog of frustration, a weird kind of clarity eventually clicked. If the market has decided that design is just a cheap, disposable commodity to be chewed up by algorithms—if the whole system of corporate gatekeeping and expensive licensing is racing to the bottom—then why even play the game anymore?

If the corporate world wants to crash the value of design into the dirt, fine. Let’s make it totally worthless to them. Not worthless as in garbage, obviously. But worthless in the eyes of the market. If we can’t make a fair living in a system poisoned by tech hype, then let’s strip the price tags away completely. Let’s make our work radically, stubbornly free.

That dark moment of “what’s the point?” turned into a spark of pure defiance. We realized it was time to step away from the corporate hamster wheel and go back to the roots.

A Little Rebellion

Look, giving our fonts away isn’t going to magically fix the design industry, and it won’t erase the ache of watching a beloved craft get trampled by tech trends.

But it gives us our power back. AI can generate a million sterile shapes, but it can’t build a community. It can’t share a human-made font with a local project or an underground designer just to help them out.

The machines and corporations can keep their sterile little bubble. We’d rather belong to the streets, the grassroots, and each other.