This typeface explores modular design through the deconstruction of a bird symbol. By extracting and reworking its details and components, the project builds a cohesive typographic system—rich in texture, structure, and visual potential.
Typographic Narratives
Typographic Narratives is an ongoing experimental type workshop that explores the relationship between analogue techniques and digital tools, focusing on a specific piece of text as raw material to create a visual language through various systems and iterations.
Typographic Design: Designing Fonts
Typographic Design: Designing Fonts explores the craft of creating type through the perspective of Blaze Type, the French type foundry known for expressive and high‑quality typefaces. The book highlights the educational and professional role of Blaze Type, showing how their typefaces, design philosophy, and teaching initiatives support both emerging and experienced designers.
The publication provides a comprehensive look at Blaze Type’s mission: liberating designers’ creativity with typefaces conceived as real working tools, combining technical precision with strong visual expression. It also addresses licensing, cultural context, and pedagogical aspects, demonstrating the foundry’s commitment to building a knowledgeable design community.
In May 2023, founder Matthieu Salvaggio launched learntype.eu, an online guide for beginners, students, and graphic designers who want to start in type design. This initiative addressed a gap—few accessible, up‑to‑date resources existed, and many quickly become outdated due to ongoing technical developments. Originally conceived as a prototype and laboratory for both content and form, the guide has since been redesigned and expanded into a print book published by French publisher Pyramyd. This new edition is tailored to support today’s designers in their type design journey.
The book itself reflects careful typographic thinking. Behind its understated cover, the object is thoughtfully designed with a soft binding and loose spine that lies flat on the desk, an index on the title page, and a refined two‑color layout that highlights essentials. The horizontal format places titles at the top and text in three clear columns below, guiding the eye and making reading continuous content comfortable without visual overload. Explanations throughout are concise, pragmatic, and supported by clear examples drawn from the Blaze Type catalog—reinforcing the book’s usefulness as a practical reference.
Content in the book is structured progressively into four main sections: Principles, Glyph Analyses, Particularities, and Appendices. The Principles section establishes fundamentals such as vocabulary, typeface anatomy, classifications, serif variations, and optical adjustments — relevant for both newcomers and seasoned practitioners. The Glyph Analyses section, considered the core of the book, breaks down the construction of capitals, lowercase letters, numerals, punctuation, and accent characters in a logical order. The method begins with simple forms like the capital “H”—a cornerstone for many related letters—then progresses to more complex shapes, reinforcing consistency and efficiency in designing a type family.
In the Particularities section, the book dives into noteworthy features of the new edition, including ligatures, stylistic details, and especially the treatment of italics—distinguishing between cursive, oblique, and slanted styles, and examining curves, anchor points, and serifs. Thirty‑two detailed entries unpack these subtleties that demand both a keen eye and technical mastery. The Appendices address often overlooked but essential topics, such as defining a creative brief, marketing a font, licensing models, and useful online resources—all critical for turning typeface design into a professional, distributed tool.
With its 324 accessible and clearly written pages, Salvaggio’s book stands as a contemporary reference for students, graphic designers, and enthusiasts seeking to understand typographic design. Its handy format, excellent readability, and thoughtful structure make it an ideal companion to consult during the design process. In conclusion, the author reminds readers that typography is a field where everyone remains a student for life—emphasizing that the learning journey never truly ends.
Typographic Design: Designing Fonts
Publisher: Blaze Type
Author: Matthieu Salvaggio
Design: Hic et Nunc studio
Release: 2025
Format: 16 × 24 cm
Volume: 324 pages
Language: English
ISBN: 978-2-35017-621-5
Price: €39.– (DE)
Buy here: pyramyd-editions.com
Found Calendar Letters
Ben reimagines the 2025 wall planner at the moment of its expiration. Once its functional job of tracking the year is finished, the discarded grid is given an unexpected second life through a process of visual rearrangement. By isolating specific dates across the now-defunct calendar, Ben reveals the word “DONE.” This work marks one final event for the year, celebrating the quiet satisfaction of completion and the transformation of a spent object into a typographic tool.
Unconditioned World
Unconditioned World is timeless and placeless. Nothing stands at the center, and no meaning remains at the edge. Freed from determinations, it begins nowhere and ends nowhere. Time collapses into continuity; space folds into relations and echoes. What connects us is not a shared language or territory, but our passage through languages and our intersections in space. Topology replaces geometry: the world is defined by shifting proximity, composed of difference, and always still becoming.
Making Time
Ben explores the cross over between temporal structure and letterform by deconstructing the standard monthly calendar. Through a process of subtraction and visual rearrangement, the functional grid of the year is transformed into a typographic tool. By isolating specific dates, Ben reveals the word “MAKE” within the passage of time. This work celebrates the constant, rhythmic nature of the creative process throughout the year
Residual Letterforms
Ben explores letterforms as the accidental byproduct of the printmaking process. These characters are formed by the residue of another action; the white of the font is the area being inked, while the black forms the background as ink bleeds over the edges. By defining the letter through what surrounds it rather than a solid stroke, Ben reveals a “negative” typography. This approach celebrates accident-driven processes and the intentional imprecision of the roller’s grain.
Action Cleaning Typeface
This experimental type is part of a project called Action Cleaning. The typeface is created on thermal paper using cleaning tools and alcohol-based products. It was made for the 14th anniversary of the International Day of Domestic Workers in 2024 as a provocation. The specimen shows scans of the typeface forming a text that explains the concept and demonstrates its readability. Each cleaning tool draws a glyph, shown in the example on the front where the coloured object was used to make the #3
Year
Each month of the year is approached as a character, discovered through unusual calligraphy tools and raw, unrestrained lines. In contrast to classical calligraphy, the work favors instinct, movement, and experimentation over elegance and control.
Art attack in progress
While searching for a phrase for an art notebook cover, the artist defined the purpose of the piece: to capture the moment when creativity strikes. The phrase “Art attack in progress” became that signal. A syringe was chosen as the writing tool to express urgency and intensity. After exploring multiple forms, the final lettering was debossed into leather, turning the notebook into a marker of active creation.
Digital Alchemy
This work is an attempt to melt, re-cast, and re-value typography, transforming concrete characters into a liquid substance. It seeks to discover new material forms, allowing language to be reconfigured beyond its conventional constraints.
GARDEN
A collaborative, hybrid installation combining textile and experimental typography. The work consists of a pixel-based embroidered surface made on wire mesh using reclaimed textile strips, combined with an aluminum typographic element. The layered system contrasts soft textile surfaces with rigid industrial materials, while blue backlighting enhances depth and visibility at night.
Arabic Typography Experimentation
A curated collective of expressive posters that explore the emotional depth of Arabic typography. Each piece is a visual experiment—merging diverse letterforms, layouts, and typographic techniques to evoke a spectrum of emotions. The collection plays with structure, transforming type into a visual language that speaks beyond words. Visual candy that delivers design, form and feeling.
Optic
Inspired by visual artist Luiz Sacilotto, Optic is a variable font made from two modules of two concentric circles, revealing the letter when one of the circles moves.
Not Everyone Needs a BRIGHT FUTURE
According to the research, artificial lights from nearshore cities cause disorientation of the Sea Turtle hatchlings, causing them to linger in nearshore zones and drawing them away from the ocean. The characters were created with the flippers of the Sea turtles and were intentionally created to look like LED lights. Additionally, the double vision effect mimics the blinding glare of artificial lights, reflecting the physical discomfort and confusion these creatures face
PROGRES/REGRES zine
The creating a zine was a multi-stage process. The first step was to prepare the intaglio matrixes made from recycled Tetra Pak milk packaging. Cutting out with an utility knife, gouging with a screw or tearing out fragments of the aluminum side of the packaging is a departure from current trends in designing digital illustrations. Then, the scan of prints was made and designs were transferred to a screen for screen printing. The result was an edition of 25 unique zines in A5 format.
Blueprint
Blueprint is a variable font made from the shapes of an architectural ruler, it’s a typeface born from the dialogue between manual drawing and the technological possibilities of variable fonts.
Demo
Demo is a research lab for experimental visual language, it embraces exploring new techniques and takes process over result. For its logo, students were asked to collage the word “Demo” out of various pieces of letters.
nobody
Parade
Parade is a display typeface designed as a living, modular system where typography becomes movement and rhythm. Inspired by the idea of a visual procession, each letter acts as part of a choreographed ensemble, creating dynamic compositions. Built from modular structures and organic, circular forms, the typeface balances flexibility with coherence. Its rounded shapes evoke continuity and flow, transforming words into expressive, evolving graphic forms.
Neobleed
“Neobleed” is a modular typeface that draws inspiration from the blackletter script, also known as Gothic script, and its lowercase serifs. The term “Gothic” was used by Renaissance humanists to describe this typeface, which they considered barbaric and barely legible. “Neobleed” rehabilitates this negative term by embracing a raw, complex, and dramatic visual aesthetic.
Les Cendres du Naufrage – Dominique White
Poster for the exhibition Les Cendres du Naufrage by English artist Dominique White at Triangle-Astérides in Marseille. The exhibition presents fictional relics made from raw materials and salvaged objects, evoking a Black population condemned to perpetual migration and disappearance at sea. The poster’s typographic treatment draws from the title, conceived as an organic, plastic vestige reflecting the exhibition’s dual and tragic narrative.
Allofme
Expressive “between” Experimental
This graphic explores the overlap between the words “experimental” and “expressive.” By allowing letterforms to collide, share space, and interrupt one another, the piece reflects a looser approach to typographic thinking, suggesting that experimentation can emerge through observation, restraint, and composition, rather than reliance on texture or visual noise.