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.
Published by 205TF

Minuscule is a typeface designed for very small sizes. Its creation was inspired by the theories of ophthalmologist Emile Javal and his “theory of compact prints” (Physiologie de la lecture et de l’écriture /Physiology of reading and writing, Paris, Alcan, 1905). I initiated this project during my studies at the Atelier national de recherche typographique in 2001-2002, and completed it, designing the italics in 2006–2007 during a residency in the Académie de France in Rome – Villa Médicis.
The font comes in five versions, all optimised for 6, 5, 4, 3 and 2 points. The design evolves progressively as "the size decreases": the spacing and the x-height increase, the contrast decreases, inktraps appear and the design is simplified. The MinUscule 2 is the strangest: “at this size, said Javal, we read most the difference between the letters”. As a consequence, the particularities of each sign are exaggerated, and the secondary details eliminated.
The contrast of the italics is not found in the spacing, almost identical to the roman, but by a more rhythmic design, progressively more lively and broken.
The Minuscule has received a number of awards: Type Directors Club in New York in 2005 (Certificate of excellence in type design); Erik Spiekermann declared it to be the Favourite Font of 2007 in Typographica (http://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/minuscule/ ), and Paul Shaw described it as one of the typefaces of the decade in Print magazine (http://www.printmag.com/imprint/ten-typefaces-of-the-decade/ ). In 2016, a collection of 256 original drawings of the Minuscule were acquired by the Centre national des arts plastiques.

Park MGM is the new name of the famous Hotel Montecarlo, on the Las Vegas Strip (Nevada). It is owned by MGM Resorts. The agency be-poles (Paris / New York) commissioned me to design the exclusive typeface of the hotel, Alder, used for its interior and exterior signage, and all of its communication.
Rather than the excessive and often caricatured image of the hotels in the city, the visual identity of the Park MGM chooses elegance, with a very refined interior design. Likewise, Alder is inspired by the proportions of classic Roman capitals, with a more contemporary design. It comes in 4 weights : Regular, Bold, Italic and Condensed. Exclusive use

Minérale is a typeface based on uncommon stems, whose sides intersect at their centers. These two triangles that meet at the tip are an exaggeration of triangular serifs.
This project was born from a lettering for an exhibition entitled Splendeurs Minérales at the Musée de Montbéliard (France). I then developed a series of weights, which share the same width: a Multiplexed typeface that occupy the same space, whatever its weight.
The same goes for Roman and Italic. Italics turn around a central, vertical axis: the more the weight increases, the more slanted is the typeface.
Minerale is published at 205.tf since 2017 for Roman, 2018 for italics. It is developed in the new technology of variable fonts, which allows the user to act directly on the appearance of the characters, on a weight axis.
Minerale was designated Favorite Font of 2017 by Typographica, and won a TDC award in 2018.
Try and buy at [205.tf]Published by 205TF

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 Multi embeds 13 different widths in each font, from 0503 (5 on 3 grid) to 05015 (5 on 15 grid). The default set is a mix of 0503, 0504 and 0505. The subfamily includes 5 fonts (2352 glyphs each) + 1 variable font. Its construction allows to compose in many widths without changing the stem weight. Letters on the lowercase set go wider and wider when repeated, and it’s fun.
Available at 205TF.
Online specimen

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 Monospace subfamily goes from 05015 (5 on 15 grid) to 3503 (35 on 3), and includes 215 fonts + 5 variable fonts. Its construction allows to compose in many sizes without changing the stem weight, and/or the pitch.
Published by 205TF

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

Mononi is a monolinear, sans serif version of the famous Bodoni, cut by Giambattista Bodoni in Parma at the end of the 19th century. I first created it for the visual identity of the Théâtre musical Besançon, a theater built at the same time by the architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. Mononi has a classic and refined structure, a baroque italic, but traced with a ballpoint pen. Combined with a normographer’s aesthetic, deliberately very crude, Mononi’s weights are growing from its skeleton. A special version, Mononi Zero, has no body. It is up to the user to determine the thickness of the line, thus allowing a multitude of weights, down to the finest hairlines. In 2012, I added Mononi Monospace versions, for the same theater which became the Scène nationale de Besançon. Soon available on www.205.tf

Ten years ago, when I was teaching at the school of fine arts in Besançon, one of my students, Julie Chu, carried out a very interesting project for her Master's degree, on the subject of interbreeding.
She had photographed the portraits of many girls in the school, and superimposed them: around forty faces, with low opacity, produced a new face. The result was surprising: a face that does not exist, certainly, but very beautiful. Seeing this work, I wondered if we could do the same thing, not with faces but with typefaces.
At the same time, I started working for the visual identity of a museum in Montbéliard, which holds important galleries devoted to natural history galleries, and in particular to the evolution of species: a famous zoologist and naturalist, Georges Cuvier, was born in Montbéliard in 1769. I took a closer look at Cuvier's theories, and in particular the fairly virulent debates that animated the Paris Academy of Sciences at the beginning of the 19th century. To be short, On the one hand there were the evolutionists, like Lamarck, and on the other the fixists, like Cuvier. Evolutionists believed in the gradual transmutation of one form into another: this led to the famous Darwin theories a little later.
Cuvier strongly disagreed. On the contrary, he believed that the species appeared and then suddenly disappeared, without changing during their existence.
I wondered, for the visual identity of the Musée de Montbéliard, if I could create two types of characters: one based on evolutionist theories, the other on fixist theories.
I picked 8 different text typefaces, very famous, which represent the main periods in the history of typography: Jenson, Garamond, Caslon, Baskerville,Bodoni, Century, Times New Roman, and Georgia. I used the amazing « Blend Fonts » feature in FontLab Studio and crossed the species over 4 generations, to get an average font, a kind of typographic chimera.
To accompany the text typeface, I wanted « fixist » a bold sans serif, which would be created from models of this family. Rather than interpolating these drawings, I chose a few letters in each, without changing it. This makes no sense, structurally. Some letters intersect vertically, others horizontally, or obliquely. Sometimes even in the same letter, like the C. To obtain a correct weight and proportions, these are not simple copy / paste, but rather interpretations. I wanted to see, in this way, if something acceptable could come out of this mess. I also add an evolutionist italic for the text one, and get a small family of three fonts. The bowl of italic lowercase k is ridiculous: the reason why is that this detail did not appear systematically in previous generations. These typefaces are full of such idiosyncrasies, which I don’t consider as defaults, but rather as traces of the process. I don't think theses fonts will ever be released: it was fun to do, and actually I'm using it for years for all the publications, scenography and signage of the museum. It's called MM Serif and MM Sans, for Musée de Montbéliard: and as a reference for Multiple Masters (there are several masters in it, obviously) and Adobe Serif MM et Sans MM, the substitution fonts used by Acrobat when a font is missing within a PDF file. Another kind of typographic chimera, in a way.

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 Wide subfamily goes from 0505 (5 on 5 grid) to 05015 (5 on 15 grid) and includes 55 fonts + 1 variable font. Its construction allows to compose in many widths without changing the stem weight.
Published by 205TF