• 2017
  • Minérale

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  • 2017
  • Minérale

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

  • 2008
  • Musiques de Rues — Programme

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  • 2008
  • Musiques de Rues — Programme

Programme of the 3rd edition of Musiques de Rues, a festival of contemporary brass bands and artistic interventions in public space. Printed in 3 fluorescent colors + black, instead of CMYK

  • 2010
  • Musée d’Orsay

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  • 2010
  • Musée d’Orsay

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.

  • 2022
  • Bugatti × Interbrand

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  • 2022
  • Bugatti × Interbrand

I was commissioned by Interbrand to redesign Bugatti wordmark and monogram, and to develop an exclusive typographic system that reflects BUGATTI's brand promise.
The type family is composed of three styles that accurately meet the typographic needs of the brand:
BUGATTI Display, an all-caps typeface for headings;
BUGATTI Text, a 2 weights typeface for texts;
BUGATTI Mono, a fixed-pitch font for highlighting technical information.

Art direction: Interbrand
Licensing and font engineering: 205TF

  • 2023
  • La Vache qui rit

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  • 2023
  • La Vache qui rit

Custom typeface for La Vache qui rit (Bel).
The specific triangular shape of the slices of this popular soft cheese appears in many details of the typeface (A counter, diacritics, quotes…)
Laughing fonts include a “Bounce” weight, with a special feature which makes the letters randomly wiggling on the baseline.
Commissioned by BETC Paris
Art Direction Éric Poupy

  • 2020
  • Garaje Multi

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  • 2020
  • Garaje Multi

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

  • 2012
  • MM — Archéologies contemporaines

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  • 2012
  • MM — Archéologies contemporaines

Catalogue of the exhibition “Archéologies contemporaines”, Musée du château des ducs de Wurtemberg, June – October 2012. 96 p.

  • 2010
  • Safari Fourier — Posters

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  • 2010
  • Safari Fourier — Posters

Besançon is the birthplace of utopian socialism : Fourier, Proudhon or Victor Hugo were born here, and, in the 20th Century, huge strikes and social movements tried to implement ideas for a new society. In 2010, I was commissioned by the City to create a work of art in tribute to this historic heritage. I proposed a series of posters that would be installed on all of the city's billboards for a week. These posters expose the theories of Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and the “Théories des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales”. During the day, they show our current society. At night, when the poster is backlit, they show society as Fourier dreamed it. In collaboration with Elsa Maillot.

  • 2016
  • Les 2 Scènes — Programme

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  • 2016
  • Les 2 Scènes — Programme

Annual programme for the season 2016-2017 of Les 2 Scènes. 80 p.

  • 2005
  • Centre d'examen du permis de conduire

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  • 2005
  • Centre d'examen du permis de conduire

Sign for the new building of the Centre (architect : Philippe Donzé, Besançon). Some letters are replaced by real road signs, which reflect the light of car headlights. Photos © Nicolas Waltefaugle

  • 1 % artistique Ministère de l’Écologie, du Transport et du Logement
  • Alucobon, prismatic adhesive film
  • Courvoisier, Saône
  • Typeface: Garaje
  • signage architecture Besançon
  • 2019
  • Les 2 Scènes — Saison

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  • 2019
  • Les 2 Scènes — Saison

Annual poster for the season 2019-2020 of Les 2 Scènes, in collaboration with Jochen Gerner (illustrations).

  • 2011
  • MM — Typeface

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  • 2011
  • MM — Typeface

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.

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