“When in doubt, simplify”: Mark Bloom on his latest release and launching CoType...

Everyone starts from somewhere, and Mark Bloom, the founder of CoType Foundry, launched his career designing night club flyers and other work for the music industry. Before this, he’d received a degree in visual communication design from Middlesex University in 1998. And just two weeks after graduating, he landed a junior design role, “and have worked in the design industry ever since,” he says. From there he went on to brand identity design, only to have been made redundant in 2009 during the worldwide recession. It was this moment that he realised he wanted to work for himself, inspiring him to launch his own studio, Mash Creative. Several years of hard work later, and he slowly gained a reputation in the design industry and started building an impressive client list to boot, which includes Pringles, Coke, Nike, Beats by Dre and many others.

Notable past highlights of Mark’s are a commission by design magazine Icon in 2010 to “rethink” the Royal Mail identity for one of its ongoing features. “As part of this ‘rethink’, I designed my first typeface to sit alongside the logo – this was aptly named RM Regular, RM standing for Royal Mail.” A couple more years down the line and his type interests grew and, in 2018 – eight years after RM Regular – he created Aeonik, his second typeface and one that he designed with his friend and ex-colleague Joe Leadbeater. “I actually sat on the original design for several years but had always planned to release it at some point,” he notes.

Then, in 2019, Mark decided to expand his interests in type even further as he launched his own type foundry – something he’s always thought of doing. As such, he created CoType Foundry which was released into the world along with four typefaces. And now, the library has doubled with eight fonts in total and two more to come. “Shortly after launching CoType Foundry,” he adds, “I quickly realised that there simply wasn’t enough hours in the day to successfully run both a design studio and a type foundry, so I made the decision to no longer take on paid client work through Mash Creative and instead focus all my efforts on growing CoType Foundry instead.” Mark couldn’t be happier with his decision, as he currently spends his day working between two passions: type and graphic design.