3IP Type Foundry  is a division of Three Islands Press (3IP), a small digital publishing company in Salt Lake City, Utah. Our specialties are historical replications, fine text type, old map fonts, painstaking recreations of vintage and modern handwriting, and a few offbeat/display creations.

Brian Willson grew up in Austin, Texas, in the 1950s and ’60s. He bounced around the Austin music scene a while before snagging a Radio/TV/Film degree from The University of Texas in 1979. The next year he became a father and promptly high-tailed it with his little family to coastal Maine, where he worked as a broadcast and print journalist for many years.

Willson founded 3IP in 1989 to self-publish a book of pretentious nature essays. Soon after, he found himself tinkering with type design, and 3IP has since become known for its library of authentic-looking handwriting fonts—many of them modeled after historical penmanship—and antique text replications.

In the summer of 2019, Willson moved with Captain Jack, his Australian Cattle Dog mix, to Salt Lake City, where, in his free time, he enjoys birding, hiking, and nature photography. For the past few years, he’s been fiddling around with fiction.

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Swedish type designer Lars Bergquist describes himself as “a living fossil from the age of lead type.” He was born in 1936 and trained originally as a historian but left university life and went into publishing—of encyclopedias and reference literature—learning that side of typography from the bottom up. The bottom line being Linotype machines like Jurassic Singer machines, smelling of hot lead and oil, and flatbed presses behaving like demented mangles. He later used to say that he was a typographer who had gone all the way from cuneiform to digital.

Bergquist began dabbling in type design at a late stage; because of his background in history, he specialized in text type with historical roots and even flirted with blackletter. After retirement, he built a second career as a type designer under his proprietary Timberwolf Type label. Two things put an end to this: medical problems leading to some close encounters with sawbones of a specialist kind, and the discovery that he’d produced so many fonts for different foundries, that he was actually competing with himself.

Although the Timberwolf Type operation has wound down, good typefaces have a life of their own. Meanwhile, Bergquist has reverted to the study of history, in rocking-chair mode, and old hobbies like epistemology, photography—and type-watching, of course.

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