The Letters
A type company by Mark Gowing
The Letters is a type company conceived as a source for contemporary fonts as well as a culmination of practice, incorporating Mark Gowing’s extensive design and fine art experience, including his groundbreaking work in experimental typography visible via our NON fonts pages.
A designer of international standing, Gowing has spent more than three decades focussed on his creative practice in which typeface design has always been a primary component, evolving naturally alongside the studio output. The Letters combines this expertise and offers licensing of expressive fonts as well as bespoke typographic solutions for organisations and institutions. Each of our projects exhibits a commitment to expression, detail and quality through the unification of language, concept and design.
Founded by Gowing after parting ways with his celebrated Formist group of companies, The Letters is about striving to be progressive and inventive by challenging expectations of what type design can be. While we are concerned with the integrity of typographic communications, we understand that creativity, personality and style are equally as important as clarity, legibility and tradition. We employ our intuition and rigour to produce typography that we hope people will find engaging and meaningful.
We are committed to the highest levels of font production. Our fonts are professionally engineered to work seamlessly across all platforms and to perform exceptionally in print and on screen. Our OpenType fonts contain a multitude of convenient features, such as automated case-sensitive punctuation and symbols, alternate figure sets and broad Latin-based language support to enhance your requirements.
The Letters is independently owned and does not licence fonts through third parties. Our catalogue features fonts suitable for a wide range of use, from expressive display types to hardworking sans-serifs, that can be licensed for almost any outcome. Our Fonts in use pages showcase a variety of examples of how our fonts are used by international organisations and institutions of all sizes, and the Our services pages provide an overview of our design capabilities. Please email us about potential commissions and collaborations.
The Letters acknowledge the Gadigal and Wangal people of the Eora nation, the traditional owners of the land upon which we operate.
Mark Gowing, founder and director
Mark Gowing is an artist and type designer living and working on Gadigal/Wangal country, Sydney, Australia. Through a creative practice spanning more than 35 years he has developed a personal inquiry into the poetry of form, grid and rhythm that he investigates using abstracted applications of text and geometry. At the core of Gowing’s practice are generative systems of visual abstraction that appropriate the basic Latin alphabet. Gowing’s written phrasing is transformed into pulsating structures that shift between language and geometric abstraction, magnifying the hidden frequencies of writing as both systematic and expressive.
Driven by the belief that typographic design is as much about feeling as it is about clarity, Gowing utilises his unique experience to develop sensitive typography based on combinations of logic and emotional understanding. Gowing has over 35 years experience as an industry leader specialising in projects for cultural and commercial organisations including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Candalepas Associates, Seoul Museum of Art, Artspace Sydney, Entertainment One, Hopscotch Films, Kaldor Public Art Projects, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, JCDecaux, Sydney Opera House, Warp Records, Powerhouse Museum, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Universal Music, University of Technology Sydney and the Venice Art Biennale.
Gowing’s work has won numerous international awards from staples such as the New York Type Directors Club, the Tokyo Type Directors Club, D&AD and Graphis. In 2008 Gowing became the only Australian to have won a Gold Medal at the prestigious International Poster Biennale in Warsaw, which was followed by a Golden Bee at the Global Biennale of Graphic Design in Moscow and a Gold Medal at the 12th International Poster Biennial in Mexico. Gowing’s work is featured in the publication The History of Graphic Design, Vol. 2, 1960–Today and his poster design is surveyed in the publication Mark Gowing: Inside the Oblong. He has been honoured with solo exhibitions at the 22nd International Poster Biennale in Warsaw, the Divieto d’Affissione in Turin, and Monash University in Melbourne. Gowing has been accepted as a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and the International Society of Typographic Designers. His work is held in numerous institutional collections including the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, USA.