The story
Founded by Neville Brody in 1990.1
After founding the first German reseller of typefaces FontShop on June 12, 1991, Joan Spiekermann, Erik Spiekermann, and Neville Brody started an independent type foundry just one year later. They commissioned a few young type designers to make the first few FontFonts. The first font ever was FF Beowolf by the Dutch Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum in 1990. It was called a “living” font because it used a random feature of the PostScript language to generate randomly different letter forms each time when printed. The library has grown over the years by numerous FF releases (being 59 until May 2012) and is now one of the world's largest collections of contemporary type designs.
Between 1991 and 2000 FontShop International published together with Neville Brody 18 issues of the experimental typographical magazine FUSE and organised several FUSE conferences, the forerunners of the annual European design conference TYPO Berlin.
In 2001, FontShop International founded their own stock photo agency called ƒStop and introduced it to the stock photography market.
In February 2010, FSI was the first font manufacturer to publish web fonts in the new WOFF format, which, in combination with the EOT Lite format supported by Microsoft Internet Explorer, supports the majority of current browsers and restricts web designers to the system fonts that are installed on all website visitors. These web fonts are linked to the elements of a website in such a way that HTML texts have the same, individual typography for all visitors.
From Wikipedia’s article on FontShop International, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4