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