Humanist Sans have sometimes a tendency to be over-roundish, slender, mannered,
mimicking the calligraphy. With Cosimo, Matthieu Cortat proposes a font in the spirit of Gill Sans, with strong shoulders, few contrast, a certain darkness in print, which gives it strength and serenity. Contrarily to many font of this style, its italic remains simple and quiet. With its clear and defined range of weights it possesses a versatility which makes it suitable for many purposes, book, titling, magazines, websites…
Nice light, straightforward Regular, virile Bold and peppy Black, each weight has a slightly different personality, but they match each others, making Cosimo a well grounded font for every-day use as well as dressed-up layouts.

This dingbats typeface responds efficiently to what a lot of designers seek: choose a series of arrows that adapt themselves precisely to any character that has previously been retained. Up to now this kind of typeface has not been enough and has rapidly revealed itself to be insufficient: the number of arrows proposed is ultimately quite limited.
This typeface proposes a much greater number, thanks to a misuse of OpenType technology. In effect, it is not a new typeface that proposes a renewed batch of arrows. It is not in fact a tool that allows the designer to compose an infinite number of arrows. Through a logical set that uses the keys on the keyboard, the designer could/can choose the different elements that make up an arrow: tail, body and point.
The arrows are automatically composed thanks to more than 5,000 kerning pairs. The user can not only choose the style of an arrow but also its length (by composing a number of successive elements) and its direction (towards the left or the right using capitals and lowercase characters).
Though there may be a certain learning curve associated with the use of this typeface, the result ultimately reveals itself to be well worth the time and effort!

Matthieu Cortat created Basetica for the studio GVA (Geneva), in the context of the Open Switzerland project, on the occasion of its attachment to the Base group, bringing together 3 agencies in Europe (Brussels) and America (New York). GVA wished to show its attachment to “Swiss Graphic Design” and what it carries in terms of quality, precision and rigour, while at the same time presenting a Switzerland quite different to the usual stereotypes that one can imagine.
Basetica is then, a "contemporary Helvetica", open and with no frills. Raw at times, but always clean and discreet, it revisits the International Swiss Style” with a certain irony.

This stencil type character is developed in 3 “Capital” series that stand out for their terminations. “Cut”: beveled edges, “Rounded”: rounded edges; “Sharp”: sharp edges.
The accents on the capitals were studied to allow a dense composition that suits this typeface. "Lowercase” is a 4th series that proposes a complete typeface with lowercase letters.
It is a relatively black typeface that best suits the composition of titles or the design of visual identities.

With the efficient and precious help of Roxane Gataud.

A display version – particularly black – of the well-knowned font Maax was designed, leading to sometimes surprising choices. This version conserves a number of sets of characters and a certain number of alternative letters.

This character is composed only of points whose diameter creates an optical effect It is developed in three weights: light, regular and bold. Contrary to what we might think, the Beretta is not a modular character. The points are placed in an optical fashion so as to optimise the regularity and legibility of each sign.
As if to affirm its originality, this character is developed in two styles: sans serif and serif. This character, a priori used for titles, reveals itself to function particularly well when it is used in small bodies.

With the efficient and precious help of Roxane Gataud and Corentin Moyer.

Injurial was designed during the editorial design of a novel by Boll, published by Tripode, in 2014. This humorous thriller features many mediums, and specifically some pretty aggressive graffiti. Sandrine Nugue chose to design a sharp, elegant typeface to be used for insults.
The result is Injurial, a typeface made to withstand the worst, while saying it with refinement and eloquence. Its proportions are those of monumental Roman capitals, and it possesses a light weight which reveals only a very slight contrast. Categorized as an incise, or glyphic serif, consisting solely of capitals, it is ideal for setting titles.

This concise typeface was originally designed for the eponymous city in Bourgogne, in 1995. Ultimately it was never used as planned for the signage in the municipal buildings.
In 2011, Damien Gautier completely overhauled this typeface to make it more lively. Its design has become simplified and stated. A number of details reveal surprising choices for this typeface that nonetheless retains its engraved origins. The numerous ligatures are a clear sign of this.

With the efficient and precious help of Roxane Gataud.

The Amiral character emerged from the discovery of the vestiges of a few letters painted on the ground. They seem to have resisted surprisingly well to time and the repeated passing of vehicles. We can still make out the rudimentary design of the letters, doubtlessly cut out of a metal plate.
This stencil typeface stands out for the robust nature of its letters that bring to mind markings on the side of cargo containers. However, this character is also used for punctuation.
Though this typeface may only be composed of capital letters, it does however contain a certain number of alternative signs.

With the efficient and precious help of Roxane Gataud.

İbrahim Kaçtıoğlu designed the extremely thick unicase typeface Seamus with humor, drawing his inspiration from the earliest American comics. The design of Seamus is exuberant, exaggerated, and caricatural. Its generous forms balloon out like Popeye’s biceps. Its massive strokes contrast with its particularly thin crossbars, and the “overinflated” curves are enhanced by tiny counters. Yet its particularly expressive letters fit together perfectly, making Seamus a display typeface with a particularly distinct style.

Cardone, developed between 2016 and 2021 is a singular interpretation of early so-called Scottish modern faces, later called Scotch Roman. Specifically created for editorial design, this serif typeface seeks an ideal balance between elegance and robustness: its ample curves contrast with the brutality of its lines and the verticality of its axis.
The five weights of Cardone ranging from Thin to Bold each with its own italic have been designed separately so as to emphasize the uniqueness of their design. Without sacrificing the elegance of Scottish modern faces, each style is pushed to the point of extreme simplicity and efficiency, both in their structure and in every formal detail.
Functional and legible, the typeface has been designed mainly for use with running text. Nevertheless the constant thickness of Thin or, inversely, the stark contrast of Bold allows Cardone to stand out when used in titles.

To extend its efficiency to multiple uses, the Cardone type family is also available in a Micro version (Regular and Italic) intended for settings in smaller than eight points. The design displays forms that are radical, mechanical and straightforward.
For more unconventional applications, Cardone Micro has also been designed to be spectacular when used in large sizes.

Could lone typeface with no serifs be enough for a designer? It is the basis of this seemingly uninteresting question that Damien Gautier really got down to work to develop this typeface with its multiple facets. Thanks to the OpenType format, he first developed 4 series. “Standard”: a set of characters that are intentionally all purpose; “Geometric”: a set of characters with elementary forms that bring to mind the first typographic experiments of the Bauhaus; “Modern”: domesticated forms that refer more to characters such as the Futura and the Nobel; “Grotesk”: here, more designed/drawn forms close to the intentions that were at the origin of characters such as Helvetica or the Akzidenz Grotesk. Four typefaces in one to some extent, accessible thanks to the “Stylistic set” function of the OpenType format.
Finally, the demonstration is made: with a single typeface, we can indeed have many possibilities!

Immortel, designed by Clément Le Tulle-Neyret, is a type family with four variants developed according to the Hippocratic theory of humors that explains these latter through the presence of one of the four principal fluids. Each one is the cause behind the development of a character trait: phlegm represents a lymphatic, sluggish, slow character (Immortel Infra); yellow bile, an angry and prideful character (Immortel Colera); blood, a jovial and warm character (Immortel Vena); and black bile provokes hopelessness and melancholy (Immortel Acedia).

This type family is envisaged like a human being, able to reveal different temperaments through the forms that it adopts. Each variant can be substituted for another without causing any change in the bulkiness of the text, as the metric system, which provides a structural link between the variants—set width, x-heights, the length of ascenders and descenders, height of capitals—is constant.

Typographically, each variant is inspired by the work of type designers, following the course of history:
— Immortel Infra finds its source in the work of Robert Granjon, a typeface engraver from the 16th century;
— Immortel Colera in the work of Jean Jannon, an engraver from the 17th century;
— Immortel Vena is influenced by the work of Jacques-François Rosart, an engraver from the 18th century;
— Immortel Acedia takes its inspiration from the engraving Melencolia I by Albrecht Dürer (1514) and attempts a synthesis between two traces of a priori opposing tools, one made by the flat tip and the other by the narrow point. In this sense it is closer to a 21st century typeface.

Immortel Infra and Vena, variants intended to be used with running text, possess two italics: the first, called “Median”, slightly slanted, is ideal for composing long text; the second, called “Italic”, with its very sharp angle and ornate instrokes and terminals, is ideal for emphasis.

To best serve running text, the Infra and Vena variants possess two grades: this signifies that these two variants have two slightly different weights that conserve the same set width so as to have a more or less dark text color according to the page layout and/or the sensitivity of the user. Grade 2 can also be used to compose knocked out text on a dark background.

This type family began life in October 2016 in the Atelier national de recherche typographique (ANRT, Nancy – France). It development was pursued thanks to the support of the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP) in 2018.

Helvetius is a reinterpretation by Matthieu Cortat of a font used in a 1778 edition of De l’homme (On Man) by french enlightenment philosopher Claude-Adrien Helvetius. The title page of this book states that it has been printed in london. As for many of its kind, it’s probably a fake adress, often used by French publishers of that time to get rid of censorship. The type itself is clearly influenced by the style of Fournier Le Jeune.
Its italic, though, is definitely playful, Those features are kept in the classical yet sensitive digital revival. Slightly condensed, with a large x-height and two extra weights, it fits perfectly any jobing work in search of accuracy, classicism, but personnality and warmth as well.
A typographical “petite robe noire” which makes parisian women classy even for everiday life.

Could lone typeface with no serifs be enough for a designer? It is the basis of this seemingly uninteresting question that Damien Gautier really got down to work to develop this typeface with its multiple facets. Thanks to the OpenType format, he first developed 4 series. “Standard”: a set of characters that are intentionally all purpose; “Géométrique”: a set of characters with elementary forms that bring to mind the first typographic experiments of the Bauhaus; “Moderne”: domesticated forms that refer more to characters such as the Futura and the Nobel; “Grotesk”: here, more designed/drawn forms close to the intentions that were at the origin of characters such as Helvetica or the Akzidenz Grotesk. Four typefaces in one to some extent, accessible thanks to the “Stylistic set” function of the OpenType format.
Finally, the demonstration is made: with a single typeface, we can indeed have many possibilities!

In 1846, Lyonnais printer, Louis Perrin commissioned founder Francisque Rey to engrave a series of capitals inspired by monumental roman inscriptions. They would go on to be used in the composition of work on the Antique inscriptions of Lyon, by Alphonse de Boissieu. In 1855, the typeface was completed by a number of lowercase fonts; certain bodies came from the stocks of Rey, others were drawn by Perrin himself. His “Augustaux”, one of the first “revivals” in the history of typography, became rapidly successful, launching the “Renouveau Elzévirien” (Old-style Renewal) movement. With Louize, Matthieu Cortat provides a contemporary reinterpretation of the Augustaux. It retains a wise and serene tone, the grey of clear text, the soft roundness of the curves. Louize is discreet, calm, harmonious.
Available in three weights, Louize has a number of small capitals (for the roman styles) and ornamental capitals (for the italics).

For use in titles, Louize is available in a Display version. This sharp and clear variant is inspired by letters engraved in stone. It brings a new contemporary freshness to this timeless typeface. The Display variants also offer, in the roman styles, a series of ligatures inspired by that of concise engravings.

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 large forms, all built from the same modules. Today it is a complete system, available in 44 widths, 5 weights, 445 fonts, hundreds of thousands of glyphs, and no contrast. Resulting in a typeface which is at the same time brutal and playful, rational and naïve.” Thomas Huot-Marchand

The Chrysaora typeface was originally commissioned by the architects of group8 and the artist John Armleder, for a piece entitled, “Les Plates-formes de la porte dorée”, inspired by the story of the Golden door. It is part of the Parisian landscape, echoing the engravings made by the great names of the wall of the Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration, originally the Museum of the Colonies, a showroom for French colonialism. Chrysaora revisits the general features of these engravings, solely in capitals, and is used to engrave texts presented in John Armleder's work. Chrysaor (literally “golden sword”) was the son of Poseidon and Medusa, the brother of Pegasus. His mother was transformed into a gorgon by the goddess Athena as punishment for having desecrated her temple. A statue of Athena, incarnating a triumphant France, decorates the Palais de la Porte dorée.
The Chrysaora typeface is available in three weights, and can be used to compose more than 105 languages, including Vietnamese with its many accented characters. It also contains numerous ligatures.

Yorick is based on a monospace typewriter font (model 3402U) found in the Campionario caratteri e fregi tipografici (specimen book) of the Nebiolo typefoundry, dated 1920 – but the font might probably be older. The source is a slab serif form very common in typewriter fonts (Pica, according to Olivetti naming system) with a little touch of classical flavour from the Imperial style (i.e. with thick and thin contrasts). Start in 2016, Yorick keeps the essence of the original design, and avoid to make it look too digital or constructed. It’s a gentle industrial font: a font of engineers in Oxford shirt and tweed suits, not in white blouse. A precision tool with eleganza torinese, not showing off. Its italic is a proper one, not a slanted roman. It comes in a simple family of 4 styles, but with a large character set which includes bot Latin and Cyrillic scripts — each completed by localised alternates for Romanian, Moldovan, Serbian, Macedonian and Bulgarian.

Justus Erich Walbaum (1768-1837), a confectioner by trade, carved his own cake molds. Quite gifted, he became a specialist, developing an activity as a punch-cutter, and eventually bought Ernst Wilhelm Kirschner’s type foundry. Considered to be one of the foremost creators of his time, he engraved gothic letters and Antiqua type, similar to those of Didot and Bodoni. But his romans had a different flavor, and for some, they contain the origins of the Grotesques that followed.
In 2010, Thomas Huot-Marchand and SPMillot were asked to develop the typographic identity of the Musée d’Orsay that had been based on Berthold Walbaum since its very beginnings. They proposed adding distant “cousins” in later typographic styles: a bold grotesque and a thin slab serif, but these typefaces would ultimately remain unused.
In 2020, Thomas Huot-Marchand decided to redesign them while developing an extended family. Album is a subtraction of Walbaum: with no serifs for Album Sans and with no contrast for Album Slab. Its silhouette retains some memory of the particular proportions and slightly flattened curves of Walbaum.
Album Slab has almost no contrast. The thicknesses of the stems correspond to the three lightest weights of the Sans version. The ball terminals, accentuated in the thinnest versions, recall typewritten letters, but with proportional tracking. An informal rereading of Walbaum, Album Slab can be perfectly combined with Sans and its italics.

Salmanazar is a typeface which has its roots in nineteenth century French type design, and in particular, the specimen of Antique Warnery no.1, published in 1922. Originally intended to be used for the composition of titles (the smallest body size being 20pt), its undecided yet vigorous strokes have been updated for contemporary use, while retaining its typically strong details from the belle-époque typefaces. Indeed, Salmanazar has a distinctly crafted look, with its own unique characteristics such as its vertical proportions, and its increasingly unusual contrast in the grotesque landscape. Its asymmetrical counters, and slightly heavy weights impose a certain darkness and a particular flavor in continuous reading, bringing to mind American Gothics, such as Franklin Gothic or the German humanistic sans serif Ludwig. Industrial in style, this typeface features a range of 4 weights, along with their corresponding italics. Each weight reveals a subtly different behavior, and this makes it suitable for different purposes.

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.

This typeface is based on the Maax, designed by Damien Gautier in 2012. It is a typeface with more convivial, naturally rounded terminations. Like the Maax, this typeface contains a number of sets of characters that give each one a rhythm and a particular colour to text.
The Maax Rounded is available in 3 weights and their italics: regular and italic, medium and medium italic, bold and bold italic.

With the efficient and precious help of Roxane Gataud and Corentin Moyer.

This stencil type typeface stands out for its geometrical structure and its elementary forms. However, a number of details seem to show what Damien Gautier was by characters of body type to determine his choices. Rare indeed are characters of this type that possess oldstyle numbers and ligatures that are usually reserved for historical characters!

With the efficient and precious help of Roxane Gataud.

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 large forms, all built from the same modules. Today it is a complete system, available in 44 widths, 5 weights, 445 fonts, hundreds of thousands of glyphs, and no contrast. Resulting in a typeface which is at the same time brutal and playful, rational and naïve.” Thomas Huot-Marchand

Maax Raw is a new variation of the Maax typeface that from the very beginning has had the ambition of questioning the status of sans serif typefaces and the importance that has been accorded to them. Each instance (Maax with its three style sets, Maax Mono, Maax Rounded and Maax Display) plays with the idea that a single sans serif character can not be enough if it doesn’t “reinvent” itself.
Maax Raw is a “crude” version of the typeface Maax. Its design is intentionally more stripped back, the optical corrections inherent to this type of character are almost completely absent, with the forms being even more closed. The font is blacker, more mechanic. Nevertheless, upon closer inspection, certain letters reveal a boldness that gives the character its particular rhythm. Certain forms are brought together even though they might seem a little foreign. The influences are many and sometimes bring to mind a vernacular drawing found on a plaque of the subway in Berlin or a strange Swiss signpost. Maax Raw exists in seven styles (regular, italic, rotalic, bold, bold italic, bold rotalic and stencil bold). A unique family to be used in projects of visual identity or communication that will stand out.

This typeface takes its inspiration from the characters that one can find on the nameplates of French streets. For a long time, Damien Gauthier 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 Plaak conserve the independent designs in a certain number of details (accents, the specific forms of a few letters: G, K, M, Q, R, etc.)
This typeface is composed of 24 styles that display the typographic wealth of this source of inspiration.
“Plaak 1 – Sathonay”: very narrow characters;
“Plaak 2 – Griffon” and “Plaak 3 – Pradel”: narrow characters;
“Plaak 4 – Terme” and “Plaak 5 – Foch”: wide characters;
“Plaak 6 – Ney”: extra-wide characters.
Each serie (from 1 to 6) contains a number of weights and a set of capital and small capitals (because the lowercase letters were almost completely missing from French street signs). 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.
An enhanced version of lowercase letters is currently being studied. Its launch is planned for 2018.

With the efficient and precious help of Roxane Gataud.

The Stuart typeface possesses the general forms and proportions of a 15th century Venetian kind. Matthieu Cortat designed it with a calligraphic reference in mind giving it a classic, regular sobriety. Its general appearance is nonetheless resolutely contemporary. Its italic is inspired by the first italics of Alde Manuce and Francesco Griffo: barely slanted, its axis of inclination varies only slightly. Stuart is available in three weights, along with their corresponding italics.
A bookish body type, it is available in a number of optical bodies for increased legibility. Stuart Titling (for sizes larger than 14 points) is narrower, its downstrokes and upstrokes are more stated. As for Stuart Text it suits mid sized bodies between 9 and 14 points. Stuart Caption, larger and of solid build, is for use with bodies of 9 points and under.

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 large forms, all built from the same modules. Today it is a complete system, available in 44 widths, 5 weights, 445 fonts, hundreds of thousands of glyphs, and no contrast. Resulting in a typeface which is at the same time brutal and playful, rational and naïve.” Thomas Huot-Marchand

Could lone typeface with no serifs be enough for a designer? It is the basis of this seemingly uninteresting question that Damien Gautier really got down to work to develop this typeface with its multiple facets. Thanks to the OpenType format, he first developed 4 series. “Standard”: a set of characters that are intentionally all purpose; “Geometric”: a set of characters with elementary forms that bring to mind the first typographic experiments of the Bauhaus; “Modern”: domesticated forms that refer more to characters such as Futura and Nobel; “Grotesk”: here, more designed/drawn forms close to the intentions that were at the origin of characters such as Helvetica or Akindenz grotesk. Four typefaces in one to some extent, accessible thanks to the “Stylistic set” function of the OpenType format.
Originally this typeface contained 4 weights and 7 styles: regular and italic, medium and medium italic, bold and bold italic, black. A fifth weight has been added with a light version. A display version – particularly black – was designed, leading to sometimes surprising choices. This version conserves a number of sets of characters and a certain number of alternative letters.
Finally, the demonstration is made: with a single typeface, we can indeed have many possibilities!

With the efficient and precious help of Roxane Gataud and Corentin Moyer.

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 large forms, all built from the same modules. Today it is a complete system, available in 44 widths, 5 weights, 445 fonts, hundreds of thousands of glyphs, and no contrast. Resulting in a typeface which is at the same time brutal and playful, rational and naïve.” Thomas Huot-Marchand

Battling is a geometrical lineal, inspired by the “Universals” that were distributed by the Dutreix foundry in Limoges in the 1930s, and that were probably intended to compete with the Europe (the French name given to Paul Renner's Futura) in the field of the “modernist” sans serifs. Battling is a robust typeface that conserves the awkwardness of its original model. It possesses a sort of “adolescent vigour”, frustrated and rowdy.
Matthieu Cortat has produced Battling in four weights (light, regular, medium, bold) with their corresponding italics. In medium and bold, it avails of a series of uppercase titling characters, decorated with a thin thread of light. It also possesses a series of roman numerals in small capitals.

With the Henry typeface, Matthieu Cortat provides a personal interpretation of the Deberny & Peignot foundry's Garamond, engraved by Henri Parmentier between 1914 and 1926 under the direction of Georges Peignot.
Its authors sought to recover the grace of the typefaces of Claude Garamont, while at the same time taking into account the reality of the modern paper industry, that uses wood based papers and not cloth based ones, as was the case in the 16th century. Henry is based on medium type sizes (9 to 14) of Parmentier's engraving. It is a quite slim Garalde, a little narrow, lean and slender. We feel an inspiration that is almost “Art Nouveau” in its z that leans towards the left, its winding a and J, the lower loop of its heavily curved t, the ample loop of its Q… These features are still visible in the italic with its changing rhythm and it s joyous ligatures.
Henry is a delicate typeface. Its design precise if not a little dated.

For the Petit Serif typeface, Matthieu Cortat was inspired by lettering created by Percy J. Delf Smith for the building located at 55 Broadway, s.W. 1, London, that he reproduced in his book, “Civic and Memorial Lettering*.
This typeface is a lineal of monumental roman capitals with classical proportions, that possesses very slight serifs due to the use of brushes in its creation. A character used for titles and shopfronts, it does not possess a lowercase, but is available in Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. The letters A and I have variants available for Basque.
Percy J. Delf smith R.D.I., ​Civic and Memorial Lettering, Adam & Charles Black, London, 1946.

Maax Mono is a variant of Maax “with a fixed set-width”. In order to emphasize its mechanical character, Damien Gautier has chosen to “harden” the strokes while intentionally, but not systematically, creating black “stains” in some areas, as if to recall the origins of typewritten typefaces. In addition to a particular rhythm specific to such typefaces, texts composed with Maax Mono possess a highly original color. Developed in direct relation with Maax, it could provide a variation when the latter is already being used. Their identical vertical proportions simplify the simultaneous use of the two typefaces.
Maax Mono is a type family originally composed of four styles—Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic—more than enough for this intentionally rough typeface.
In 2021, Damien Gautier added two styles – Stencil and Semi-Stencil – increasing the range of use and scope of this typeface. In addition to developing a strong personality, these two new variants allow one to consider using the typeface as reversed type, or with stencils. With the arrival of these two new styles, Maax Mono could easily be used as a typeface for titles or for signage.

Thelo is a type family that emerged from a consideration of the publishing conditions in the digital era. 
Designed by Tassiana Nuñez Costa between 2014 and 2020, the typeface aims to answer contemporary editorial questions of coherence and legilibility accross medias and reading formats. In order to adapt to different reading contexts, on screen as well as on paper, and to allow for an efficient hierarchization of content, Thelo has three variations of optical sizes (Display, Text and Micro) that refer to the optical settings typically used by punchcutters of the lead type era. Applied to digital typography, this principle allows the optimization of reading comfort on screen.

The constraints of digital media have driven Tassiana Nuñez Costa to make some striking formal choices:
Thelo Text (Regular, Italic, Bold) is adapted to the composition of running text. Its clean and functional design brings it closer to modernist style typefaces but its pointed connections and terminations evoke certain characteristics of flared glyphic typefaces.
Thelo Display (Light, Regular, Bold) has been designed for composing large sized texts such as titles. Its design is enhanced by lively and sharp lines.
Finally, Thelo Micro (Regular, Italic, Bold) is tailored to the composition of smaller sized texts such as footnotes and captions. Its quite solid rectangular serifs provide it with the aesthetic of a slab serif.

Thelo is named after the Thelocactus, a variety of cactus native to Mexico: linking the harsh aspect of on screen display and the arid lands of desert zones.

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 large forms, all built from the same modules. Today it is a complete system, available in 44 widths, 5 weights, 445 fonts, hundreds of thousands of glyphs, and no contrast. Resulting in a typeface which is at the same time brutal and playful, rational and naïve.” Thomas Huot-Marchand