The Man Behind Paris’s Most Public Typefaces
His type designs are featured in the Paris Metro and le Monde Newspaper. We recently spoke with Jean about his passion for typography and his sources of inspiration. (Please note that we maintained Jean’s European spellings below, which we find as charming and elegant as we do his type design.)
Type is your Passion. What is the genesis of this fascination? When did it start? Did it evolve over time, or were you a type “prodigy?”
My first serious encounter with typography took place in the late eighties when I was studying at a graphic design school called EMSAT. We had a guest teacher there named Roland Renaff who had been a trainee at the ANCT in Paris, a specialised school for type design. He introduced me to calligraphy and type design and made me realise that there were other career paths beyond graphic design or advertising. All the young kids at my school wanted to become illustrators or art directors; nobody was seriously interested in type. So I thought: hey, here’s my chance to do something special. When you’re an adolescent you don’t want to be like the rest.
To choose type design was, at that time, pretty extraordinary. In my second year of school, I started to work as a freelancer at Ford design agencies. I was already specialised in the optimisation of letterforms created by art directors. This was before the digital age, of course, and certain skills were required to create good curves and artwork for printing. For my third and last year at this school, I decided to start to design a typeface, the one known under the name Angie now. To submit the typeface to the Morisawa awards and win a prize the next summer helped assure me that there was a future for me in designing type.
What was the first typeface you fell in love with?
In my student years, I was very interested in the work of Hermann Zapf, as his typefaces with strong calligraphic influences have been a good “link” between writing, calligraphy and typeface design. I learnt good typeface design from two fundamental sources: a calligraphy course and books like Sebastian Carter’s Twentieth Century Type Designers at the end of the eighties. I was also fascinated by the writings of John Dreyfus and Lawson’s Anatomy of a Typeface.
I also bought Hermann Zapf’s books and became very interested in his design philosophy. Looking at all the drawings and finished forms on his book was a very good way to understand more deeply how a shape of a letter is built. So my “first loves” were simple and obvious typefaces like Palatino and Optima. You can see a strong influence of his Comenius* on Apolline**, the second typeface I designed after FF Angie.
It was during this period that I began frequenting the Rencontres International de Lure, a yearly type conference in the south of France (Lurs). I got on very well with its organiser Gérard Blanchard, who was a man of great culture, very eclectic. He was also a very modest man, a kind of mentor to many young designers at the time.
* http://www.identifont.com/similar?2K0
** http://www.porchez.com/article/657/apolline-ptf-renaissance
Whose creative work with typography, in any medium, inspires you?
I have a great collection of lettering, shop signs and images from various trips all over the world and just everyday life. I can’t say that it’s a direct inspiration, but I can’t visit a place without looking at letters on walls, architecture, menus in restaurants, etc. I’m on Instagram under the name typofonderie, and a few images from my collections appear there, or on my personal Twitter account @jfporchez.
I’ve currently built two type-related personal image collections on iPhoto: the Street signs folder, and Historical type folder. To take a recent example, I was recently in Rome for the weekend, and I added 50 images, from Roman inscriptions to shop signs on the streets of the city. I shot my first two at the Orly airport: a comparison between Frutiger (the official typeface used from 1973 under the name Roissy on Paris airports) on one sign, and Myriad used by mistake on another identical sign.
How is your own design process different from a standard on-screen creative process?
Except in my early years, I have typically designed typefaces on tracing paper, and I still use this technique for script faces. I mainly work directly on the computer and generally don’t draw on paper unless it’s for sketching quick ideas that can’t be considered “finished” drawings of letterforms. So my method is typically to design on the computer with Béziers curves in FontLab. I generally never print anything until the full glyph set is finished. But for kerning, 17 pages* in A3 format are always printed by series to check all pairs possible on a typeface, then corrected on screen, re-tested again on paper until its perfect.
* for a Latin typeface following the PTF glyph set http://www.typofonderie.com/alphabets/technical/ptfopentype/
What type projects have made you most proud and why?
In term of design, it’s generally the last design I worked on, simply because the older my typefaces get, the more problems I see, and I want to make improvements. It works this way because I’m in perpetual evolution. Typefaces have a second life, the real life. This life starts when in hands of designers. It’s what they do with the typefaces that’s I find most gratifying. An example is Parisine, which has been used for many years in the Paris métro, buses, etc. It’s everywhere and serves people everyday, without calling attention to itself. The typeface is simply functioning as a choice of the designer, just there to serve information.
Regarding recent projects, AW Conqueror was a really good project in various aspects. Reflex Image, an advertising agency based in Paris, wanted to hire type designers to create a series of typefaces, each of them to fit one of the ATypI classification category: Garalde, Reale, Didone, Mécane, Linéale… A collection of unique fonts, without any connections between them, to represent a new papers collection? It didn’t seem to make sense, so I immediately pushed for something else even before starting the project, during the initial phase when we were discussing budgets and so on. I didn’t see the appeal of creating a unique weight of another Garamond, a unique weight of another Baskerville. Such families need very large glyph support and plenty of weights. It wasn’t what Conqueror need to promote a collection of quality papers.
Still, Reflex Image was very clever to use digital typefaces as a means of reinvigorating and promoting paper, which is of course not easy to present on the web. The brief required that the fonts we were asked to design originate in 1888, Great Britain, and should be free for the next two years at conqueror.com.
Rather than the astonishing quotation for five potentially boring Regular full glyph sets, without any clear relationship in term of branding, collection, team… I proposed small glyph sets, mostly caps, but based on same structure, with some connection between them (width for example), to offer a great and easy titling toolbox to any designers, from beginner to skilled.
Superfamilies exist for quite a long time, but generally they are text faces, and all of the members, from Sans to Serif, etc. Rotis is a typical example, one of the worst. All variations are clearly related—too much sometimes. Superfamilies in the display typefaces category are less common. But this idea of a toolbox was the crucial aspect of my idea. Each variation of the family intentionally refers more to the history of typography and graphic design than pure typeface design history. The idea was to emulate the notable designs from the sixties and seventies, when large display, “tight but not touching” spacing was dominant. At the end, it’s not to literal references but a toolbox for contemporary design easy to catch up.
For the first presentation, I created 12 variations. Depending how Reflex Image creative director Nicolas Champion will react, we worked on an assemblage. Which ones will work well in all combinations?
Perhaps the challenge was to set up a level of quality that will best represent the Conqueror papers without giving a wrong signal to the font market, as the fonts created are free for users for the next two years. It’s why the quality is high in term of design, final artwork, with few OpenType features, but glyph set is minimal—just enough to make it clear that these are free fonts and we aren’t in competition with commercial fonts of a higher level.
In your opinion, what is today’s design student NOT learning about fonts that they need to know?
I don’t what they aren’t learning, as I’m not a teacher in all design schools. But I know what they need to know. The first thing is to compare classical typefaces to modern interpretations made by the best type designers today (or from the last 100 years). The history of typefaces is a perpetual evolution. Nothing is fully invented from scratch, for the simple reason that the first use of any typeface is to be read. When you can’t read a typeface anymore, it ceases being a functional typeface, and it’s not typography anymore! Comparing historical fonts with today’s versions is like entering into the mind of the designer, you can analyse and understand why suddenly he decided to interpret this form a certain way.
The second thing I’d impress upon students of type is to open your eyes in the streets, or when you take holidays in a difference place—places where you discover new food, new languages and so on. Again try to compare, learn a new vocabulary, allow yourself to be influenced by culture that you don’t know. One of the keys is how you will mix all your influences. Pretty much like a good chef when he reinvents a simple dish to create a masterpiece with taste, colors, etc. Said in another way: work hard, be yourself, respect history and never copy. Read a lot books (no Annuals or Best of, featuring list of “images+credits”). Exchange as much as possible with fellow professionals, go to conferences, ask for advice, follow key people on Twitter, Facebook, dribble, Instagram, etc.
Thanks, Jean, we are honored that Porchez Typofonderie web fonts are available for your use on WebINK!