Futuracha is the most successfully crowdfunded font in history, by Athenian studio Høly. And no, it doesn’t look anything like Helvetica. Via FastCo Design:
“The transition from the old version to the new one proved to be truly demanding,” says Odysseas Galinos Paparounis, designer of Futuracha and CEO of Høly. “In order to make Futuracha Pro as easy as possible to employ, we had to come up with numerous letter variations and glyphs, so that at the end of the day, everybody can simply type with it, without bothering with typographic principles, which the mechanism of alternations take care of.”
But the effort was worth it: It was specifically this combination of forces that made Futuracha Pro a landmark success. The original font was a good product, and it already had a big audience thanks to its free distribution (and thanks to that audience, a waiting list of 10,000 people awaiting an updated version). The team relaunched it as a markedly improved 2.0 take–which could be privately licensed for $15 and commercially licensed for $50, each a relatively low price. In other words, Futuracha is yet another overnight success that, upon further examination, required years of development and brand building.