205 Corp.
24, rue Commandant-Faurax
69006 Lyon
France
T. 33 (0)4 37 47 85 69
M. contact@205.tf
Newsletter
205 Corp.
24, rue Commandant-Faurax
69006 Lyon
France
T. 33 (0)4 37 47 85 69
M. contact@205.tf
Newsletter
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 Sans proposes a new reading of grotesques with an extended range of weights: the horizontal terminations of the R and the a, the binocular g, the junction of the k along with the singular design of the numbers, distinguish it from usual forms. The duplexed italics have a reduced slant. As an informal reinterpretation of Walbaum, Album Sans can be perfectly combined with Slab.
Augure, designed by Simon Renaud, is based on an a priori paradoxical principal: how to move beyond traditional letterforms without undermining legibility? To this end, this typeface questions the canons inherited from Roman capitals and Carolingian minuscules.
Augure freely reflects a range of diverse influences: somewhere between historical forms of the Latin alphabet (including Uncials), forms taken from cryptography, and forms inspired by digital technology and its rationality. The combinations of elementary forms are reminiscent of early twentieth-century experiments with geometric sans serifs. The juxtaposition of these many borrowed elements provides the typeface with a formal singularity, generating captivating typographic compositions.
Though Augure is also available in a variable font format (weight and slant), the typeface has seven different weights by default (from Thin to Black). The user can thus activate one of the three stylistic sets (classic, eclectic, cryptic) or separately select one of the numerous alternate glyphs contained in the typeface’s extended palette.
Sarah Kremer’s Bartok redefines the very notion of a type family. Its four styles with their singular designs break with the principle of formal unity usually sought after in such families. Each variant stands out for its expressivity, contributing to the creation of a contrasted whole.
The development of Bartok was undertaken in the context of editorial design in order to propose a multifaceted typeface with only four styles. It has been designed to be used for long or short passages of straight text as well as for titles.
With the aim of proposing complementary typographic colors, the four styles of Bartok (Regular, Italic, Highlight and Poster) have been designed with different structures and possess distinct weights. Each variant develops formal specificities taken from different moments in the history of typography.
Inspired by Humanist typefaces, Bartok Regular is based on the proportions of typefaces derived from incunabula. Its asymmetrical serifs and slanted stems are characteristic of calligraphic script. Its squat counterforms combined with its stability give compositions both pace and balance.
Bartok Italic explores the calligraphic model of the chancery hand, to offer strong cursivity combined with a supple design, changes in direction and pronounced lines and angles.
The archetype of the early grotesques is visible in the Bartok Highlight: an assumed density, varying contrasts and non-orthogonal terminals.
The details of Bartok Poster, with its irregularities of alignment and varying angles, can be fully appreciated in large sizes. Its heavy weight, changing contrasts and roundness infuse it with a certain bonhomie.
Though these formal differences are quite pronounced, certain curves and details are echoed from one style to another. The general proportions of the typefaces (x-heights and cap heights) have been harmonized so that they can be combined easily and naturally.
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.
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.
Dédale, designed by Thomas Bouville in 2020, is a hybrid type family inspired by inscriptions carved into the stone of the underground passages of the Paris Catacombs*.
Identified while exploring underground, the diversity of the inscriptions and their varying states of erasure inspired the designer’s unique approach. Rather than seeking to unearth the original drawings of the stone engravers (in an attempt to “rewind” the flow of time), Thomas Bouville sought to reveal links between the inscriptions and wanted, on the contrary, to give a sense of the passing of time.
The varying structure of the letters, common between styles, skillfully evokes the ossuary. It emphasizes an analogy between the letter and the human body, composed of both a skeleton and a physical envelope. The evolution of the three styles – from lineal to slab serif – shows the effect of time and the passage of life towards death.
The Light version – a slab serif made elegant by the contrast between its refined appearance and the prominent serifs – is designed for composing large sized titles with subtlety. The Regular – an incised typeface with pronounced extremities, is designed for reading long texts. The Bold version – a neo-grotesque sans serif that conserves certain details of the incised form – is useful for its strong lines. Each style has its own italic.
Dédale is also available as a variable font, allowing the design to move freely between the three styles, with the technology seeming to play with time.
*Dédale was originally created for the visual identity of the Paris Catacombs.
Exposure borrows the eponymous principle from photography, using it to question the possibilities offered by variable fonts in a completely original way. While studying at the Atelier national de recherche typographique (Nancy, France), Federico Parra Barrios took a very unique approach to the technique, developing a singular typeface between 2019 and 2022.
Available in Roman and Italic, Exposure is a remarkable feat — both technically and in terms of drawing — that shows how other ways of exploiting variable font technology are possible.
While variable fonts — which appeared in 2016 — are considered to be a major development in typography, the use of axes of variation to modify weight, set-width, and optical size are all transformations inherited from previous techniques. Federico Parra Barrios breaks away from this conventional approach to propose a new way of thinking.
Exposure’s axis of variation ranges from –100 to +100, and gives a feeling of adjusting the intensity of the light to which the typeface is exposed, thus affecting its outline. Some might see this as a nod to another, now defunct, technique: phototypesetting.
At zero, the typeface is sharp and crisp. As the index decreases, the font becomes increasingly underexposed. The typeface seems to deform and becomes overwhelmingly black. The counterforms are filled almost to the point of illegibility.
Conversely, as the index increases, so does the light intensity. The original line is somehow overexposed until parts of it vanish as if burned by the light.
Federico Parra Barrios has carefully sculpted many intermediate designs in-between these extremes. In its static version, Exposure is also available in 21 different intensities of light. With the variable version, the user is free to select the index according to their needs and, of course, dynamically exploit the technology to create animations.
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.
The Kelvin typeface is the culmination of a sensitive thinking around a modern aesthetic in typography. It is expressed through two stylistic axes — with and without serifs — with both being based on two historical ideas of modernity. Even though their designs are not based on the same skeleton, Kelvin Avec and Kelvin Sans are tied together by a common philosophy, that of building as opposed to plotting or drawing. Each one is accompanied by an italic and a titling version in which their inherent characteristics find themselves exacerbated.
Kelvin Avec takes its inspiration from typefaces which appeared at the beginning of the 18th century, attached to the family of traditional serifs. Its main reference is the Romain du Roi whose creative process is divided into two stages: a conceptual study which is then followed by an adaptation of the designs during the engraving of different sizes.
The Kelvin Sans pays tribute to the typefaces which appeared at the beginning of the 20th century and that we connect to the family of geometrical sans serifs. The observation of typefaces created by Jakob Erbar, Rudolf Koch, Edward Johnston and Paul Renner along with typefaces from promotional advertising documents from the epoch, came to nourish the design process of the Kelvin Sans.
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!
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!
Maax is a sans-serif typeface whose design possesses few optical corrections so as to give it a certain obviousness and authenticity. Consequently, certain counterforms are relatively small, and can even become clogged when its size is reduced, or when the medium upon which the typeface is printed makes for an imprecise result.
As its name indicates, Maax Micro is a variant of the Maax typeface, specially designed for use with small and very small sizes. Inktraps, invisible to the naked eye at sizes below 8 points result in more open counterforms. These traps are designed to function by “absorbing” the ink that would otherwise build up, clogging the counterforms.
The spirit of the original typeface remains intact. Maax Micro possesses exactly the same palette of signs as Maax, including the many alternative signs that make it so original. However, some will appreciate these surprising, sometimes extravagant forms, caused by the addition of these ink traps, modifying the principal function of this Micro version and setting the typeface in large sizes, using it as an original titling typeface.
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!
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.
Muoto is an extended type family, begun as a collaboration between Matthieu Cortat and the agency Base Design (Anthony Franklin and Sander Vermeulen). Published in 2021, Muoto has now been completed with three new set widths: Ultra Condensed, Condensed, and Extended.
Muoto is the synthesis of a sensitive and human approach to modernist design. This variable sans serif font combines full curves and solid stems, showing that functionalism can actually be warm and softly effective.
With its robust structure and subdued proportions, it evokes organic forms dear to Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, who in 1957 wrote: “we should work for simple, good, undecorated things, but things which are in harmony with the human being and organically suited to the little man in the street.”
Muoto embodies this idea while simultaneously responding to contemporary typographic standards with its range of weights (from Thin to Black) and now its four set widths (from Ultra Condensed to Extended), and everything is fully variable!
In 2009, when GVA Studio joined the Base group, it marked the Swiss studio’s entry into a network of international scope. With tongue firmly in cheek, Base Geneva designed a site to generate posters that played with stereotypes of Swiss style. Basetica “a Helvetica for the 2010s” was designed in this context, commissioned from Matthieu Cortat and distributed by 205TF a few years later.
In 2021, Base Design wished to redefine their typographic identity, and so the studio once again invited Matthieu Cortat to collaborate on a typeface to succeed Basetica.
What came next was a story of debates and questions, of micro-modifications and radical decisions, of discussions and rich debates.
In 2022, Matthieu Cortat began working on an extension for Muoto so as to offer designers a typographic tool with greater potential for expression and a wider range of applications. The Extended and Condensed styles resize letters to 20% of the standard proportions, while the Ultra Condensed design is even more radical as it assigns a single set width to the counterforms, regardless of weight. This “irregularity” in the definition of widths emerges from a typographic and visual logic rather than one based on mathematics, and allows designers to adjust both the set width and weight thanks to the variable font format.
Muoto is an extended type family, begun as a collaboration between Matthieu Cortat and the agency Base Design (Anthony Franklin and Sander Vermeulen). Published in 2021, Muoto has now been completed with three new set widths: Ultra Condensed, Condensed, and Extended.
Muoto is the synthesis of a sensitive and human approach to modernist design. This variable sans serif font combines full curves and solid stems, showing that functionalism can actually be warm and softly effective.
With its robust structure and subdued proportions, it evokes organic forms dear to Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, who in 1957 wrote: “we should work for simple, good, undecorated things, but things which are in harmony with the human being and organically suited to the little man in the street.” Muoto embodies this idea while simultaneously responding to contemporary typographic standards with its range of weights (from Thin to Black) and now its four set widths (from Ultra Condensed to Extended), and everything is fully variable!
In 2009, when GVA Studio joined the Base group, it marked the Swiss studio’s entry into a network of international scope. Withtongue firmly in cheek, Base Geneva designed a site to generate posters that played with stereotypes of Swiss style. Basetica “a Helvetica for the 2010s” was designed in this context, commissioned from Matthieu Cortat and distributed by 205TF a few years later.
In 2021, Base Design wished to redefine their typographic identity, and so the studio once again invited Matthieu Cortat to collaborate on a typeface to succeed Basetica.
What came next was a story of debates and questions, of micro-modifications and radical decisions, of discussions and rich debates.
In 2022, Matthieu Cortat began working on a Muoto monospaced extension. By following the same design space as for Muoto, Cortat pushes the limits of the monospaced genre through four width series: UltraCondensed, Condensed, Normal and Extended.
From this program, Muoto Mono family combines original and functional solutions into a coherent system so as to offer designers a typographic tool with greater potential for expression and a wider range of applications. Lastly, the definition
of widths emerges from a typographic and visual logic rather than one based on mathematics, and designers will be able to adjust the set weight thanks to the variable font format.
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.
Renotype, designed by Radim Peško, began as a formal exercise seven years ago. The objective was to create a simple, low-contrast typeface that could serve as an archetype or mould for characters of the Latin alphabet. Based on proportions as they were developed, changed, and established over the centuries, it responds with letter shapes that are not connected to any specific epoch or tool but are instead aesthetically functional — like a bathroom.
The Renotype family includes a variety of styles, going from traditional (Regular, Italic), standardised (Mono), playful (Quasitalic) or speculative (Medieval). These styles do not expand Renotype through weights but rather through the flexibility of its construction and plain character. They are establishing the narration and, at the same time, indicate more possibilities and explorations.
Romain 20 is a well-rounded and clear-cut interpretation of a French elzevir, revisited to suit twenty-first century taste. Designed by Alice Savoie, the family is released in 2020 after 8 years in the making.
Romain 20 is a contemporary adaptation of a metal typeface originally named “Romain Vingtième siècle”, distributed by the French Fonderie Allainguillaume at the very beginning of the twentieth century. Savoie stumbled across the typeface in a 1902 edition of the journal La fonderie typographique and was immediately seduced by its texture on the page.
The typeface features a unique combination of flavours, with some attributes that are very much reminiscent of French publishing and jobbing work of the period. Soft bowl terminals are balanced by sharp bracketed serifs. The typeface combines a certain idea of French elegance with a hint of Art Nouveau frivolity.
The typeface was initiated as a revival of the text cuts of the roman and italic styles. A bold and a bold italic were later added to the family for greater versatility. The generous and sturdy proportions of the regular and italic styles have been fine-tuned to be optimal at text size, while the bold variant can prove particularly efficient in display. The italic retains generous proportions, making it fairly comfortable to read in continuous settings. The bold is particularly dark.
Type design: Alice Savoie
Typeface development: Fátima Lázaro
Font mastering: Roxane Gataud
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.
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.
Zénith is a typeface intended for editorial design. Thanks to the possibilities offered by Variable Fonts format, Graphic designers can modulate both weight and optical size, transforming Zénith from a typeface designed for small sizes of body text into a particularly elegant and contrasted display typeface.
Here Matthieu Cortat delivers his personal interpretation of Zeno, a typeface cut by Charles Malin in 1936 for the German-Italian publisher Giovanni Mardersteig, that he discovered in the Sanctum Evangelium, printed in 1963 by the Officina Bodoni. He adds a Cyrillic character set absent from the original model.
The relatively sizable width an taut curves of Zénith give it a generous and jittery appearance that permeates the different styles. The axis is heavily slanted, giving the C a characteristic silhouette. With its wide serifs, it already has the makings of a “classic”. The heaviest weights appear intentionally stocky while never veering into caricature. The italics are calm and balanced and only slightly slanted, and they discreetly allow a particular word to stand out, or on the contrary, an entire paragraph to be read with ease.
The rhythm is stable, ample and regular in the Text styles, but its true character asserts itself in the Display styles. The contrast between wide and narrow letters grows as the thin strokes become even thinner and the x-height is reduced.
Zénith Text could be compared to a swimmer before a race: well built, flexible, warmed up but calm, breathing deeply and regularly. Zénith Display would be closer to a marathon runner, skin tightly stretched over lean and jittery muscles.
A typeface clearly designed for reading that also gradually reveals a stark personality as its optical size is increased.
Zénith is a typeface intended for editorial design. Thanks to the possibilities offered by Variable Fonts format, Graphic designers can modulate both weight and optical size, transforming Zénith from a typeface designed for small sizes of body text into a particularly elegant and contrasted display typeface.
Here Matthieu Cortat delivers his personal interpretation of Zeno, a typeface cut by Charles Malin in 1936 for the German-Italian publisher Giovanni Mardersteig, that he discovered in the Sanctum Evangelium, printed in 1963 by the Officina Bodoni. He adds a Cyrillic character set absent from the original model.
The relatively sizable width an taut curves of Zénith give it a generous and jittery appearance that permeates the different styles. The axis is heavily slanted, giving the C a characteristic silhouette. With its wide serifs, it already has the makings of a “classic”. The heaviest weights appear intentionally stocky while never veering into caricature. The italics are calm and balanced and only slightly slanted, and they discreetly allow a particular word to stand out, or on the contrary, an entire paragraph to be read with ease.
The rhythm is stable, ample and regular in the Text styles, but its true character asserts itself in the Display styles. The contrast between wide and narrow letters grows as the thin strokes become even thinner and the x-height is reduced.
Zénith Text could be compared to a swimmer before a race: well built, flexible, warmed up but calm, breathing deeply and regularly. Zénith Display would be closer to a marathon runner, skin tightly stretched over lean and jittery muscles.
A typeface clearly designed for reading that also gradually reveals a stark personality as its optical size is increased.