A Tiny Type Foundry Opens on Ledger Street
Custom lettering for restaurants and civic posters now has a walk-up window with samples in the glass.
Shoreline Type, a two-person foundry, opened a storefront on Ledger Street with a walk-up window for consultations and a wall of specimen sheets that change weekly.
The shop is 620 square feet on the ground floor of the Fennimore Building, between a shoe repair that has been there since 1974 and a vacancy that has cycled through four tenants in six years. Rent is $1,410 a month on a three-year lease with a two-month build-out abatement, terms the landlord’s agent, Corinne Fauss, described as “what it takes to get somebody onto that block who will turn a light on at night.”
Co-founders Jen and Arlo Kett design typefaces and hand-paint signs. Their retail experiment is as much marketing as commerce: most revenue still comes from commissions. Of last year’s gross - $186,000, which they volunteered without being asked - roughly 58 percent came from custom lettering and sign work, 27 percent from licensing three retail typefaces through a distributor, and the remainder from workshops and one municipal contract.
The first week brought restaurant owners seeking menus that do not look like printer templates and a city staffer quietly asking about wayfinding that feels less generic.
The city staffer was Devon Marchetti, an assistant in the transportation department’s active-mobility group, and he was not there on official business. The department’s wayfinding standard, adopted in 2016, specifies a licensed typeface that costs the city $4,100 a year in seat fees and that Marchetti says nobody in his group can legally modify. “We have a sign at the Basin Road crossing where the street name does not fit,” he said. “The answer from the standard is to abbreviate. The answer from anyone who has looked at a sign is to draw a narrower letter. We cannot do that. It is not our type.”
Jen Kett, who spent eleven years in a studio upstate before moving to Port Meridian, is blunt about why she finds this interesting and also why she is not chasing it. “Municipal work pays late and specifies everything,” she said. “But a city that owns its letterforms can fix its own signs for a hundred years. That is a better argument than anything I could put on a specimen sheet.”
## The case against the storefront
Not everyone in the trade thinks a retail window is a good use of two designers’ hours. Ruth Amankwah, who runs a four-person branding studio on Cordage Street and has hired Shoreline Type for three projects, said she told them not to do it.
“A foundry’s product is a file,” she said. “Files do not need a street address, and the walk-up window means that when somebody wanders in at two in the afternoon with a question about their sandwich board, one of the only two people who can draw a curve stops drawing curves. I love them. I think they built a very expensive interruption.”
Arlo Kett does not entirely disagree. He tracked the first six weeks: 214 walk-ins, 31 of which produced a quote and 9 of which produced a job, for about $11,300 in booked work. Against that, he estimates the window has cost him somewhere between eight and twelve drawing hours a week. His counter-argument is that four of those nine jobs came from people who did not know that commissioning lettering was a thing a person could do.
“You cannot market your way into someone’s imagination,” he said. “You can put a brush and a half-finished ‘R’ in a window on the street they already walk down.”
The specimen wall rotates on Mondays. The current sheet is a working draft of a slab face the Ketts have been developing for three years, named Kestrel, with a lowercase ‘g’ that has been redrawn, by Jen’s count, forty-one times. Customers are invited to write comments on a clipboard hanging beside it. Most are compliments. One, in a child’s handwriting, says the ‘g’ looks like a fish, which Jen has decided is a compliment.
Workshops on lettering basics begin next month. Tools are provided; patience is not. Twelve seats, $65, four sessions, and the first two dates sold out in a day - a signal the Ketts are reading carefully, since workshop income is the one revenue line that does not depend on somebody else’s marketing budget surviving a bad quarter.
There is a practical constraint on all of it. The storefront’s north-facing window, which is the reason the space was affordable, gives beautiful even light for painting and almost no direct sun, which means the hand-lettered gold leaf work the Ketts want to expand into cures slowly in winter. Arlo has been experimenting with a heated panel and has not solved it.
For now the space is open, the wall text is sharp, and the harbor noise filters through the loading doors on warm evenings - a reminder that culture here has always shared a wall with work.
Late on a Thursday, with the window shut and the specimen sheet for Kestrel taken down for revision, Jen was still at the drafting table with the ‘g’. Asked what she was changing, she turned the sheet around so the letter faced away from her, held it up to the glass, and looked at it backwards through the pane, the way sign painters read their own work from the street. “There,” she said, and marked the counter with a pencil. She did not explain what she had seen.
Reporting for this story was prepared for The Harbor Ledger’s culture desk. Tips:newsroom@theharborledger.com