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.

Contributors

Most existing records were researched and entered directly by the registry's maintainers. Anyone else who submits a record - via a New person or New typeface issue form or a direct pull request - is credited by name on that record's own "Cite this record" section instead, and listed on the Contributors page. Contributors can be individuals or institutions.

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. Every record also has a Dublin Core XML export at the same path with a .dc.xml extension, and every person record additionally has a MARCXML export at .marc.xml, built directly from the same schema fields, so an institution's own ILS or repository software can ingest a record without hand-mapping JSON first. The MARCXML export is informational, not a NACO-authorized name authority record, and says so in its own 500 field. 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. RTD is listed among OpenRefine's own documented Reconcilable Data Sources.

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. Wikidata items can also point back: the Registry of Type Design ID (P14791) property stores an RTD id directly on the matching Wikidata item.

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 v1.0.4, 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), registered in the ARK Alliance's own NAAN registry (arks.org/ark:54728), 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 142 people and 167 typefaces in 20 scripts.