Fontourist is the Norwegian type foundry of designer, maker, and educator Hans Gerhard Meier.
What began as a side-quest inside my broader creative practice has slowly grown into a small but playful collection of fonts-each with its own story, origin, and peculiar personality.
How I Work
Every Fontourist typeface begins the same way I approach most of my projects: with curiosity. Whether the source is a flea-market treasure, a workshop experiment, a piece of street art, or a photo found while traveling, the process always returns to the fundamentals:
- Sketching, tracing, and drawing every single letter in Adobe Illustrator, then copy/paste in Glyphs Mini.
- Letting materials and moments define the direction. Elevators, hubcaps, stencils, wooden type, dog poo—if something catches my eye, it might become a font.
- Combining travel, culture, and observation I’ve always been fascinated by typography in the wild: handwritten signs, plaques, artifacts, activism graphics, and the visual noise of big cities. Many Fontourist fonts are typographic souvenirs, captured, remixed, and given new life on the keyboard.
Why “Fontourist”?
Because I am, at heart, a tourist in the world of typography.
I’m not a traditional type designer. I’m a curious amateur who enjoys exploring, collecting, and reimagining the letters I find along the way. “Tourist” doesn’t mean unserious—it means open, playful, and unafraid of making things simply because they spark joy.
It’s not where you go, it’s what you bring back…