Yo Freckles brings the ideas of open design, peer production and collaborative design to typography. It was designed to be a playful titling font, comprising submissions from all over the world, available for download and free of charge. Style-wise the project differs from other peer-produced fonts: instead of aiming for a uniform, typographically honed type, the aim was to make the type as varied a collection of different styles as possible, leveraging the creativity of the contributors. The focus was not only on typographers – the open call was for anyone interested. The name of the font was inspired by the scattershot style that was used in the Finnish Design Yearbook.

Yo Freckles is distributed for free under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License via yofreckles.com.

The Finnish Design Yearbook series, a biennial publication showcasing the best of Finnish design, worked as a catalyst for the Yo Freckles typeface. The publication of the 2012–13 edition coincided with World Design Capital Helsinki 2012 celebrated in Finland. The Finnish design capital year celebrated democratic design that makes our everyday lives better with openness and inclusiveness as its key themes. This open and participative thinking was included in making the publication.