Kortemäki, among family and friends in his native Finland, literally rows to work on an island off of Helsinki, where his studio is part of an artists’ community. The idyllic setting he describes is marred only by a flock of agitated Canadian geese.

Individually, these designers run their own studios. Collectively, they are Underware.

One example, the Sauna family, called by its creators “a typeface for all sizes,” consists of 18 fonts, including two italic styles, ligatures, and five quirky sauna-inspired dingbat fonts. The typeface is aune-pected. Large point sizes offer puffy, sassy headlines, while smaller sizes become delicate and pristinely legible.

The Underware website offers formidable insight into Sauna and the studio’s other faces. Here, type is not presented as an artifact or a mere sales item; it is portrayed and marketed as a creation, the result of a prolonged artistic process. Underware fonts have individual personalities and, for each, there is biographical detail.

The site includes type in animation, samples of type in use featuring other designers’ work, PDFs for type demonstrations and, unusually, related stories. The text is informative, often amusing, and technically astute.

Spreads from “Read Naked,” featuring Sauna’s saucy dingbats.

The three partners agonize over what would be fascinating enough for everyone to want to read, while attempting to find a device that allows the type be seen at its full potential. They often recruit other designers to collaborate on projects, like Piet Schreuders, who worked on the provocatively titled Read Naked.

In Read Naked, Underware places Sauna &8212; literally &8212; in a sauna. Contributors to the sauna project relate history, myth, and custom of the Finnish invention, including details on how to build an ice sauna. The technical details of the narrative extend to the designed pages, which are sauna-proof, including those that transform while the reader sits in the steam. The stories are collectively fascinating, and the design itself raises temperatures as the Sauna family veers from fat and sassy to meticulously minuscule, demonstrating that Sauna is, as Underware claims, “a typeface for all sizes.”

The three remain in frequent contact through email, iChat and phone. But they also feel the need to meet fairly often. “Sometimes we all sit together at the same place, depending on the kind of project. Or for another project, I go to Finland for a few weeks to work with Sami. This keeps working fun, and our lives attractive and fresh.” Jacobs says.

“If you think we have a very rigid strict planning of all our projects, sorry, we’re not like that. The location does matter, as inspiration, for example. These different locations will probably influence our design work. But that location can be anywhere. Jacobs adds, “Sami recently worked for three months in India, combining work and travel. I think this way of working will happen more often in the future. What’s more important than being in different locations, is that we all have different backgrounds, grew up in a different environments. This causes different angles and creates different perspectives.”

Underware is committed to promoting type, both in a general way and through education. “We have our radio channel, we give workshops, and we teach at the art academies,” Jacobs says.

Designing type, of course, remains Underware’s primary passion (three new typefaces are in the works). “But even more important,” Jacobs says, “is that we keep the fun in what we are doing.”