a chinwag with goodtype’s katie johnson and ilana griffo
How they got here, why imperfections are magical, and how to find your own creative voice.
We recently set off to sunny Los Angeles for Adobe MAX 2025, where we learnt about all the cool stuff happening at Adobe, got inspired and hung out with some rad members of the creative community.
Among them were Adobe MAX speakers Katie Johnson and Ilana Griffo, who run the online education and inspiration platform for artists and designers, Goodtype.
Who are you and what do you do? Ilana: We are the co-owners at Goodtype and, as individuals, we are illustrators, surface designers, lettering artists, graphic designers and, now, authors as well – our book Follow your Art comes out in March.
Goodtype is a place for people who love type – I know, shocking from the name – but we offer education, community and a place for people to level up if their business is anything creative and surrounding type, and to connect with other people around the globe who also love type.
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How did you end up at Goodtype? Katie: Goodtype was created by Bode Robinson as a hub for inspiration and sharing up-and-coming type designers and lettering artists. It was at the time when Instagram could really blow up, and Bode got such amazing attention for all these artists. Some people have come up to us and said, “My whole career was changed because of a post on Goodtype,” which is so cool.
Ilana started following me because I was featured on Goodtype, ironically, before we were involved with it. She slid into my DMs about an art licensing course that I was going to give, and she was like, “I have a similar idea.” At first I thought, “Oh, no. She's gonna do that, so I should just give up.” And then I realised, “Actually, let's see if we can put our heads together and do it together.” We reached out to Bode and said, “Hey, can we teach licensing to your audience?” We just really connected with her. She was looking for someone to take over so she could go do more of her own art stuff, so we took over the reins.
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Why were you interested in teaching creatives about licensing? Katie: Licensing was such a game-changer for our businesses. When we found it, we were both making stationery and greeting cards for our own shops, and companies started reaching out asking to license that stuff. I got a question from a greeting card company: “Can we license your design?” I googled it because I didn't know what licensing was, but I said, “Sure, of course.” Ilana had a very similar experience.
Once we understood what licensing was and how you could be in charge and create the art ahead of time, and that clients can then come to you and buy art that you've already made, and then they handle all of the production and the marketing – stuff that we were really not loving – we were like, “OK, wait. This is the sweet spot, because we can do all the creating without having to deal with the product side of things.” That was something that not a lot of artists even knew was an option. So we thought, “Everyone should know this.”
Ilana: Licensing existed for illustration and was definitely a term that people in that world knew, but in the lettering world, people really didn't know. “What does this contract even mean?” Like, we literally had no idea what we were signing up for, and it changed how we felt about being business owners. It changed our mental health a lot and improved it so much.
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What have you learnt from running Goodtype? Katie: We've learnt so much through Goodtype, and our previous business together Loomier, and then even before that in our personal businesses. It’s been different eras of learning. I would say this era has been about what serves our audience and feels good to us at the same time, because sometimes we've gone too far into what we think the business ‘should’ look like. We're artists first, and we've accidentally gone too far away from that a couple of times while we've been figuring this all out. Balancing the support for other artists and making time for us to make art has been one of the bigger trial-and-error learning experiences.
Ilana: We have a few sayings that we repeat to each other constantly. At the beginning of this year, we said this was “the year of the experiment”, where every month – or however long it takes – we would ask, “What if we tried this?” Like, what if we tried not sharing our work on the usual social media, but we shared it on LinkedIn? What if we tried doing only passion projects for the month? And so we just started being more curious. The common themes that we keep coming back to are: if it's not fun, it's not fun. Don't do things that aren’t fun. There's no such thing as an art emergency. Nothing we're doing should put our mental health at risk or put anyone's safety at risk.
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Any controversial font and type opinions? Ilana: I actually think there's a lot of toxic messaging around design. We felt it a lot in school, and so we kind of set out to be a place where there's no such thing as bad type. ‘Bad’ type is actually really good type – hand lettering that's wonky is actually really fun and enjoyable, and using a font that's kind of silly and imperfect has a time and a place, and so all types are welcome.
Katie: “All types are welcome” is one of our taglines. We each had educational experiences when we were in college where our peers – and the way that the design world presented itself – felt a little bit prohibitive or scary in that you have to know the right fonts to use, or else everyone's gonna point and laugh at you. So we're very anti that culture.
When we were a feature account only, we were looking for things that make us feel something. It doesn't matter if it has imperfections – the more we lean into things being imperfect, the more enjoyable we find them. The more we let those mistakes live, the more human-made it feels. Right now, with the rise of AI, those things are so much more magical than they used to be.
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Speaking of human-made, say, a designer wants to get into lettering and design their own type. Of course, you learn the basics. But after that, how do you go about developing your own style for your own type? Ilana: That's what our book Follow your Art is all about! The baseline is: the more art you make, the more you see your through lines. And it is really hard to see those on your own.
Katie: We’ve had so many students come to us and say, “I have no idea what my voice is. It's all over the place. I don't know what style I want to do.” We take one look at their work and we're like, “I see the through lines here. There are so many puzzle pieces that are coming together that you're not seeing because you're too close to it.”
In our book, we delve into different prompts. There are prompts that help you get art out into the world, think about your personality traits, and the things that you love; the things that you're inspired by. We do a lot of food metaphors – we talk about how you're basically this deep, rich, ever-evolving sauce of all your influences, inspirations and what you've experienced in your life. We help distil all that.
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What’s next for you? Ilana: We're on a mission to have more fun and really foster those passion projects.
Katie: Part of what we did this year was open a studio arm of Goodtype, where the two of us are combining our freelance practices, and we're just starting to really see what that looks like.