Garaje takes its inspiration both from the alphabets of the Bauhaus school and the vernacular inscriptions of Spanish garage owners: two worlds that share a desire to reduce typographic forms to simple geometric elements. At the Bauhaus this geometrization is ideological: it represents a rejection of tradition and the affirmation of an objective and rational vocabulary. With garage owners it is a simple matter of logic, certainly due to an ignorance of tradition. It is somewhat naïve to wish to reduce the shapes of the alphabet to elementary forms. Perfect geometrical forms seem less than perfect to our eyes: type Design abounds with optical corrections that compensate for our perception of forms.
Garaje plays specifically with this paradox: its construction is rigorously geometrical, anchored to a scalable modular grid, with no optical correction. A perfectly objective system, but a typographical aberration, simultaneously right and wrong. For the last 20 years, I have extended this family in every direction, to the point of absurdity: extremely narrow or outlandishly wide letterforms, all built from the same modules. Today it is a complete system, available in 44 widths and 5 weights. The complete family counts 445 fonts, hundreds of thousands of glyphs, and zero contrast: Garaje is a typeface which is at the same time brutal and playful, rational and naïve. Garaje Mid subfamily goes from 0503 (5 on 3 grid) to 0504 (5 on 4 grid) and 0603 (6 on 3 grid), and includes 15 fonts + 3 variable fonts. Its construction allows to compose in many widths without changing the stem weight.
Available at 205TF.
Online specimen

Luxeuil script is a very rare Merovingian script, from the beginning of the seventh century. It is derived from uncial, half-uncial and roman cursive: before the advent of the Carolingian Minuscule, it is considered as one of the first formal minuscule.
Intrigued by this local unknown writing, born a few kilometers from my home, I studied it with my friend Claude-Laurent François and tried to design a digital version of it. I had to understand the ductus and then to reproduce the gesture and stroke of the pen. Rather than drawing the outlines, I digitized the inner skeleton, and applied afterwards a virtual elliptic pen. This dynamic approach allowed me to create the very large number of ligatures contained in this handwriting: these ligatures are created automatically with initial, medial or final contextual forms.
Unpublished

Catalog of the monographic exhibition of Gyan Panchal at the Musée d’art moderne de Saint-Étienne. The book presents the artist's works exhibited in three places, in Cajarc, Rochechouart and then Saint-Étienne. The work begins with blank pages, then a close-up section in low opacity, before varying the light and whiteness of the paper according to the three very different exhibition spaces. The book has an free back binding, and is slipped into a white paper case. 172 p

Launched by François Busnel and Éric Fottorino, this mook tells of America, its beauty, but also its faults and cracks. Each quarter, the greatest French and American writers are invited to become the memorialists of an extraordinary era. 4 issues for 4 years: the time of Donald Trump’s presidential term.
For the header, I designed a custom lettering inspired by American typefaces, something between Woody Allen and Ralph Lauren. Lowercase m is an obvious reference to Windsor, but the wordmark is sturdier.

The Musée d’Orsay wanted, in 2010, to renew its typography, returning to the typeface defined in its original visual identity, developed by Bruno Monguzzi and Jean Widmer (1986). The museum will was to update Walbaum, cut by Justus Erich Walbaum (around 1830), then unique typographic voice of the institution. With Philippe Millot, we defined a family of «cousins» of Walbaum, in styles that appeared later in the 19th century. For text typefaces, a Grotesk (sans serif and bold), and a Typewriter (slab serifs, low contrast, and light). For display typefaces, the uppercase present variations of texture in the manner of 19th century display type. Unfortunately, the Museum barely used this new typeface system.