Degheest Family

↓ English below ↓

(FR)

En mars 2022, Velvetyne accueille une nouvelle autrice, Ange Degheest (1928-2009), et diffuse plusieurs revivals de ses caractères typographiques, redessinés, complétés par des étudiantes de l’EESAB — site de Rennes et leur enseignant.

Les six nouvelles familles, dont certaines sont constituées de plusieurs styles sont :

• FT88 Regular, Italic, Bold, Expanded, Serif, Gothique et School redessinées par Oriane Charvieux et Mandy Elbé ;
• Latitude et Équateur redessinées par Eugénie Bidaut;
• Abordage redessinée par Eugénie Bidaut;
• Louise redessiné par Luna Delabre et Camille Depalle;
• Director Regular, Light et Bold redessinés par Justine Herbel et May Jolivet;
• Basalte Fond, Volume et Multicolore redessinés par Benjamin Gomez et Eugénie Bidaut.

L’ensemble de ces caractères permet de retracer le parcours d’Ange Degheest, typographe bretonne oubliée comme de nombreuses autres collègues, dont l’histoire témoigne de la vitalité typographique du XXe siècle, de la variété de ses applications, de ses techniques et de ses outils.

Conjointement à la diffusion de ces six familles de caractères, Poem, la maison d’édition allemande dirigée par Jérôme Knebusch, publie un nouveau pamphlet en anglais sur la redécouverte de ce travail exemplifiant, qui est l’occasion pour Alice Savoie d’aborder l’invisibilisation des femmes et leur rôle dans la production et la création typographique.

Pour en savoir plus, nous vous conseillons vivement de vous le procurer sur le site de Poem ! 

Allez voir aussi la page-web dédiée au projet, développée par Eugénie Bidaut.

(EN)

In March 2022, Velvetyne welcomes a new author, Ange Degheest (1928-2009), and distributes several revivals of her typefaces, redesigned and completed by students from EESAB — Rennes and their teacher.

The six new families, some of which are made up of several styles, are :

• FT88 Regular, Italic, Bold, Expanded, Serif, Gothique and School redesigned by Oriane Charvieux and Mandy Elbé;
• Latitude and Équateur redesigned by Eugénie Bidaut;
• Abordage redesigned by Eugénie Bidaut;
• Louise redesigned by Luna Delabre and Camille Depalle;
• Director Regular, Light and Bold redesigned by Justine Herbel and May Jolivet;
• Basalte Fond, Volume and Multicolore redesigned by Benjamin Gomez and Eugénie Bidaut.

All these typefaces allow us to retrace the career of Ange Degheest, a Breton forgotten female typographer like many other female-colleagues, whose history bears witness to the typographic vitality of the 20th century, to the variety of its applications, its techniques and its tools.

In conjunction with the distribution of these six typeface families, Poem, the German publishing house headed by Jérôme Knebusch, publishes a new pamphlet in English on the rediscovery of this exemplary work, which is an opportunity for Alice Savoie to address the invisibilisation of women and their role in typographic production and creation.

To find out more, we strongly advise you to get it on Poem website ! 

Here is also the web page dedicated to the project, developed by Eugénie Bidaut.

Pilowlava 3D

Earlier this year we introduced you to new kind of projects we wanted to release under the Velvetyne umbrella. We gave these projects the name of Non-Fonts Objets or NFOs. Now is time for a new NFO, or Almost Font Object. Let us introduce you to Pilowlava 3D!

Vienna based designer Vincent Wagner of Studio Brot contacted us at the beginning of last summer, offering us something we have never done nore released: to create 3D meshes from one of our fonts and to release them under an open-source license. We were extactic from day one. This project would fit in our project of releasing creative open-source projects that would go beyond fonts while being rooted in our practice. These 3D meshes, as well as our font files, are a tool given to the community. They can be used in 3d renderings, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) projects, video games, or even cast in plastic or concrete if you want to give it a try.

For his first Velvetyne 3D font, Vincent chose to work with Pilowlava. Its bulbuous shapes directly make you think to inflatable ballons and seemed that they would handle well the constraints coming with 3D rendering. Vincent then created independent 3D models for a wide selection of latin glyphs of the Pilowlava font. Note that this work is not like a simple automatic extrusion. Vincent carefully sculpted every glyph, achieving the rounder and puffier rendering you could get. Note how the z-thickness of the strokes is not uniform, increasing and decreasing with the width of the strokes, but not linearly. The achieved effect is such as the one you would get by bending a metal tube. This work brings Pilowlava into the haptic world.

Those 3D glyphs have been modeled for subdivision. Each single glyph is made from 76 to 786 polygons. This work is released under the Free Art License, meaning that it’s freely usable for any personal or commercial use as long as you credit its author, and modifiable as long as you share the modifications under the same license.

Files are available under the .blend .c4d .fbx and .obj formats.

Download Pilowlava 3D

Get/fork the source files here. And find the Pilowalava 2D sources and fonts here.

All images above by Vincent Wagner

KARRIK–THE GAME

Early access

When we released Karrik, we also published quite confidentially a little interractive fiction to go with it. I was thinking about to write one for a long time, because it seemed a fun way to show what a font can do in small size and what is its real texture while you read. And Karrik—because of its background (a custom font made for the issue of Cercle magazine dedicated to the topic of Ghosts)— was a good candidate. This family was intended to look as an old-fashioned sans-serif, bringing the clumsyness from both vernacular typography and obscure early 20th c. foundries. Karrik comes from the “bad” typography of ghost towns and half erased road signs, and I thought it would do a good job setting the mood of a murder story in a countryside village with some supernatural twists. In the end we didn’t communicate a lot about it because it was only one small piece of the promotion materials, but we all felt this game had some potential of its own. So when I posted it on reddit to have some feedback from the community and Gibbo contacted me to offer to edit and proofread it—we thought it was about time to level up and make a nice upgrade.

Patch

We hired Gibbo to edit and proofread the text. He made a very good job, correcting grammar and spelling mistakes, but also making the story more smooth. He suggested a tons of micro-improvements that, just like in type design, can seems very small one by one but make the whole a lot better in the end. With such a good text in our pocket, we felt we needed to enhance it again. So came the idea of illustrating it. One big beautiful image to have a kind of cover, like an actual book.

DLC

One of our very dear team member (Julien Imbert) suggested to contact John Grümph, a table top rpg writer and a skilled illustrator, to make this image. But after a few exchanges it appeared that Le Grümph had the time (and the motivation) to make more than one image. Like many. He played the game, choose key moments, and delivered nice clean black and white drawings that match perfectly the mood of the story. I can’t show them all, because you need to discover them in-game, but geez, look at this.

PLAY THE GAME