About the registry

Registry of Type Design (RTD) is a free, human- and machine-readable registry of typefaces and the people who made them, digital and pre-digital, across scripts and geographies. Every record is independently sourced, given a permanent identifier, and published as a citable page alongside open data, so it can be reused, cross-referenced, or checked against its own sources.

Origin

Registry of Type Design began as a concept in 2021, aiming to keep a live registry of verifiable information about typefaces and the people who made them. The registry's founder, Subhashish Panigrahi, was trying to collect information about typefaces and type designers to update Wikidata, and reached out to several type designers, including Dave Crossland (Google Fonts), Yesha Goshar, Kalapi Gajjar-Bordawekar (Universal Thirst), who pointed at existing public resources such as Google Fonts, Adobe Fonts, Typotheque, and MyFonts, among others. While those sites are cited in RTD as sources, they are not catalogues of typefaces and type professionals. By 2026, the paper prototype had become a live project with the full capability to maintain permanent records of type design history. Registry of Type Design is currently maintained at the O Foundation.

Licensing

Site and data are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0): reuse, adaptation, and redistribution are permitted with attribution to Registry of Type Design and a link to the license.

Machine-readable data

Every record here is published as JSON alongside its HTML page. The People API and Typefaces API list every active record with its id, name, and canonical URL. Each individual record is also its own JSON document, for example api/people/rtd-p-000001.json. Bulk CSV and NDJSON dumps of the full dataset are published at /dumps/, for mirroring or offline analysis without hitting the API record by record.

Reconciliation service

RTD runs an OpenRefine Reconciliation Service API (v0.2) at rtd.theofdn.org/reconcile, so a spreadsheet column of names can be matched against RTD the same way OpenRefine already matches against Wikidata. In OpenRefine, on a text column: Reconcile → Start reconciling → Add Standard Service, enter the URL (https://rtd.theofdn.org/reconcile), then reconcile against the "Person" or "Typeface" type. It reads RTD's own published data at request time, so it always reflects whatever's currently live, no separate copy to keep in sync.

External identifiers

Where available, a record's Identifiers section lists a Wikidata QID, VIAF and ISNI (name authority files used by libraries worldwide), LC/NAF (Library of Congress), GND (the German national authority file), a WorldCat Entity id, and a Getty ULAN id (Union List of Artist Names). These are cross-references, a distinct concept from sources (see the sourcing policy in CONTRIBUTING.md): they let a researcher or another database confirm that a person or typeface here is the same one referenced elsewhere.

RTD ids and the schema

Every record has a permanent, opaque id (rtd-p-000001 for people, rtd-t-000001 for typefaces): six digits, assigned sequentially, never reused or reassigned once published, even if a record is later merged or deprecated. The slug used in a page's URL can change if a record is renamed, the id never does. The full validation rules are public: person.schema.json and typeface.schema.json on GitHub define exactly what a valid record looks like, currently schema v1.0.0, versioned separately from the site itself so a change to the data shape is always visible and dated.

RTD ids also resolve as ARK identifiers under NAAN 54728 (ark:54728/rtd-p-000001, resolvable at n2t.net/ark:54728/rtd-p-000001), and the registry commits to keeping identifiers and data available long-term, see the preservation and persistence statement for specifics.

Registry of Type Design currently archives details of 114 people and 138 typefaces in 18 scripts.