I have purchased from Letterhead in the past and found the staff to be very helpful. I even experienced some problems receiving the font via email and they were very quick to correct the problem. I haven't really seen any other foundries doing this type of work. Even if there are, Letterhead is the leader in this area of tyopography.

I highly recomemend doing business with them!

I've had trouble with Emigre's shopping cart system several times, emailed them repeatedly and heard absolutely nothing back. As a designer I wanted to order type, as a teacher I wanted to order other materials. Couldn't do either through their site.

Fortunately there are other ways, but I did miss out on some nifty posters.

;^) My thoughts exactly, Stephen, my thoughts exactly!

Thank you to Mr. Coles for clarifying the point I was trying to convey. Emulating and digitizing the Sign Painter style was what I was referring to. Your linked examples were exactly what I was thinking of, not to mention my personal favorite Diptripflipfantasia! Just for the crazy name.

And to Mr. Peters, no problem. I understand. I knew I didn't clarify my point well enough once I read your response. Sorry for the confusion.

To be fair, my problems with Emigre's cart took place about a year ago, and I only tried to reach them by email (I'm in Japan, making phone-calls to the States no fun for timing and pricing reasons, especially when I should be able to use the darn cart!).

I just took a gander at their site now and walked through a mock sale. I did manage to get past the point that threw up a server-side error before, so I will say that that problem no longer exists.

And I will stop now, as this thread was not about problems with Emigre, and I do not have a problem with Emigre.

Dangerboy, stop kidding yourself. ;) You won't be able to
find digital type of this style and quality for less money.
Trust me, you get what you pay for. Personally I think the
prices over at Letterheadfonts are very decent.

I haven't really seen any other foundries doing this type
of work.

That's not true at all.
You can expect no less from Emigre, Thirstype and
especially House Industries for example.

I guess most small to mid-size foundries know what
they're doing service-wise. Can anybody else share
his/her experiences, good or bad, with certain
foundries?

Strange. I quite recently purchased licences for
the Cholla family through my job, and both the
Tarzana and Solex families personally, and
simultaneously took advantage of their free Euro
upgrade of my previous licences. At my job the
shopping cart system worked smooth as a baby's
bum, but at home I had some problems too. After
a fax and two phone calls, they e-mailed me all the
licenses no prob. Even twice, as the first e-mails
somehow got held up and I needed the volumes fast.

It's true that sometimes when communicating with
Emigre's sales department you can experience some
hick-ups, but usually that's not fatal.
Maybe it could be an idea to gather some less good
experiences and submit them to Emigre.

I haven't really seen any other foundries doing this type
of work.

Maybe Kojo is referring to fonts like Mirage, Sarah Script,
Boston Truckstyle, Crouching Tiger, and Monogram English
that capture the exagerrated brush typical of a certain
formal sign-painter style. It's an important genre of
(mostly-American) graphic history and I don't see anyone
else digitizing this stuff - at least not as well.

Ow. Misunderstanding. My mistake. Non-native English
speaker, yaknow.

Haha, blame it on the english skills. We know you better
than that Yvezzie. Love ya.

LOL =D

Silly me. I'd better read a little more carefully
instead of making a fool of myself. And you're right:
those Letterhead fonts are really a class apart.

No indeed it isn't, but I think it's interesting to
know how different foundries cope with the specific
problems related to online ordering. Maybe an idea
for a thread in General Discussions?