Hi, I’m Mikko. I wanted to be a typewriter as a kid. I became one instead, the literal kind. I write type and turn it into fonts.
I’ve been selling them online for a decade now, somewhere around 187 font files and climbing. They’ve ended up on book covers, album art, billboards, and the occasional movie trailer.
The longer version, for the curious:
I’ve always cared a lot about handwriting. By college my notebooks were getting photocopied for notes, physics to anthropology, didn’t matter the subject. The best compliment I ever got was someone telling me my handwriting looked like a font.
In 2008 I made one. I called it Mix Sans, mostly because I hated Comic Sans that much. I put it on a font sharing site out of boredom, it got picked up, and the download count kept climbing. Then donations started coming in, then license inquiries. I had no idea there was a market for something I just liked making. Mix Fonts became its own thing in 2015, once there was enough of it to need a real home.
I don’t really make things to sell them. I make things because I need to know everything about them first, how they work, what they could become if I keep pushing. Sometimes that turns into a font. Sometimes it turns into teaching someone else how to make one, or how to sell what they’re already making. The selling part comes second, if it comes at all.
My day job is in HR. My weekends are pole and aerial. Whatever’s left over goes to Mix Fonts, the craft blog, and a couple other digital things I’ve squeezed in between. None of it started as a business plan. I’ve just spent a long time trying to get other people to believe their version of a multi-income stream, passive, semi-passive, passion project, whatever it ends up being, is definitely doable too.
