Italic & Mono, two vector-twisted companions
Both styles, side-kicks to a central Roman, carry deep scars of the tools that produced them, as to point out their inherent Bezier substance. The Italic shares its x-height and optical weight with the Regular, but draws its structures in flourished Renaissance types such as Robert Granjon’s and its peculiar flavour in the made-up exercise of trackpad-calligraphy. It is an hommage to yesterday’s masters using one of the most common gesture-based interfaces of today.
The Mono cut is built upon the Regular but has been strongly distorted with DataFace, a little program we made based on the classic FontTools library, that allowed us to automatically switch all on-curve points into off-curve ones and vice-versa. It gives the type’s contours a unique treatment, mixing arcs and straight lines in a completely unorthodox and vivacious way.
Bringing together History and the technical essence of nowadays typography, these two styles both integrated a part of surprise in their design process, a desired lost of control, an acceptance of error to bring out shapes that pure drawing would fail to imagine.
Imagining Syne has been a very exciting exploration, driven both by fun and serious interest in the many questions it raised. We took time to consider not only the importance of a custom type as main vector of an identity, but the meaning of the idea of family in typography. We ended up seeing it somewhat similar to the artistic gesture of Ready-Made, or Found Object, perfected by Marcel Duchamp in the early 20th century: not that the family preexists the designer, but that the mere fact of gathering fonts and calling them ‶family※ can be most of what makes it a family, more than any objective resemblance.
We think of Syne as an assemblage of personalities — they can live all together, in small groups or on their own and will always create a surprising and distinctive visual situation.
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Syne was imagined by Bonjour Monde and designed by Lucas Descroix with help from Arman Mohtadji. The Mono style was distorted using Bonjour Monde’s DataFace, written by Arman Mohtadji. The Syne family is available with a SIL Open Font License.
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