“While we were designing Polona (polona.pl), a digital repository for the National Library of Poland that would contain millions of digitized prints, maps and books from the library’s vast collection, we saw thousands of pages with beautiful typography from past years. That’s how we came up with the idea: What if we enabled people to type, share and print their own messages using characters from this vast archive of typography? The library greenlit the project, and we started working simultaneously on the application and the half-automated system for extracting letters from archive scans. After two months, we were ready with the application and had 10,000 letters to use. Meant as a tool for online promotion of Polona, Polona Typo (typo.polona.pl) was launched without any marketing except one post on the library’s website. It went viral. To this day, hundreds of thousands of people all over the world use it for such different things as concert posters and protest slogans.”