The Clifton is a reinterpretation of the Athenian typeface that was distributed around 1896 by the British Type Foundry. It is also close to the Fantail typeface proposed by the American Type Founders. This typeface, with its inverted contrast compensates for the finesse of its stems through its imposing serifs that draw a black dot in the letter, thus providing a particular sparkle to a composition. Less contrasted than the drawing of reference and with its very important x-height, the Clifton has been designed as a body text typeface.
The italic is not a simple slanting of the roman but has its own design, very slender and mobile. It has nonetheless been designed as a duo, marking the difference and allowing for a strong contrast with the roman within a text.
Its style, located somewhere between Italians and Westerns, gives this typeface the American flavour of the latter but with a rawer touch, as if it had come straight from the Bayou. As a tip of the hat to this reference, its name pays tribute to musician Clifton Chenier, father of Zydeco, the style of black music from French Louisiana of the nineteen thirties.

Plaax (with an x) is an extension of the typeface Plaak (with a k) completed with lowercase letters. Plaax is a large family of 20 cuts.
This typeface takes its inspiration from the characters that one can find on the nameplates of French streets. For a long time, Damien Gautier has been interested in these letters that everyone sees on a daily basis without really knowing them. No one seems to pay them any attention and yet they reveal themselves to be particularly interesting due to their great diversity. Though we can imagine that it is always a question of the same typeface, a closer study shows that a number of alphabets co-exist. One common point: elementary, robust forms, that seem more to have been traced than drawn by a few industrial draughtsmen, eager to be able to compose names of streets, avenues and boulevards in the restricted space of a standardised enamelled plate (well almost, this is France after all!)
It is definitely not a question of smoothing out and unifying all of the drawings finishing with a slick and homogenous typeface! On the contrary, Damien Gautier wants these typefaces to conserve the disparity of the typographic forms that have been noted.
In an apparent logic of organisation and of design that somewhat amusedly reminds us of the method used by Adrian Frutiger for the Univers typeface, the different series of the Plaax conserve the independent designs in a certain number of details (accents, the specific forms of a few letters: f, g, j, k, r, t, y, etc.)
This typeface is composed of 20 styles that display the typographic wealth of this source of inspiration. “Plaax 1 – Sathonay”: very narrow characters; “Plaax 2 – Griffon” and “Plaax 3 – Pradel”: narrow characters; “Plaax 4 – Terme” and “Plaax 5 – Foch”: wide characters; “Plaax 6 – Ney”: extra-wide characters.
Each series (from 1 to 6) contains a number of weights. By activating the “Ligatures” function, a particular series of ligatures refer to the origin of this typeface…
Thanks to its many variants and its design that is rid of any outdated pastiche, this typeface reveals itself to have a large range of possible uses: press, publishing, signage, visual identity.