A type foundry is a design studio that produces and/or publishes retail typefaces, designs custom typefaces or does various activities related to type design (logotype designs, consultancy, etc.).

We inherited the term foundry from companies that produced fonts of metal type for printers. Back then, a font was a set of movable metal pieces of type in one size. Those metal pieces (one per glyph) were produced by melting an alloy of lead and other metals, which would be poured into a mold to produce multiple copies of one letterform or other character. “Fondre” is the French verb for “to melt.”