Moulin’s syncopated cadence

At its core, Moulin is about rhythm. Along with typefaces by Ladislas Mandel, Adrian Frutiger’s underappreciated Icone, released in 1980 and somewhat forgotten in the transition from phototype to digital typesetting, was one of Nugue’s inspirations. “Icone was a point of departure for the design,” writes Nugue, “but once I started drawing I didn’t look at it again, to not do a revival and only keep the spirit.” The distinct shape created between letters by the sweeping curves at the typeface’s incoming and outgoing points makes for a fascinating tension between regularity and asymmetry. However, where Icone is systematic—Frutiger described it as being intended to withstand mechanical distortion—Moulin is idiosyncratic. Icone has highly regularized proportions and shapes; Moulin has more variety, giving it a crackling energy that holds a reader’s attention.

As a display face, Moulin also has some traits in common with Friz Quadrata, the only typeface designed by Swiss designer Ernst Friz, a onetime student of Walter Käch. This typeface was one of fifteen selected for the 1966 International Type Face Design Competition sponsored by Visual Graphics Corporation and later became part of the ITC library, with a Bold weight added by Victor Caruso. Ubiquitous through the 1970s and ’80s, Friz Quadrata is another typeface that uses sharp stroke endings to bring elegance to a relatively low-contrast design.

One early use of Moulin that illustrates what it does well is SANS (FR) 1628-1924, a visual essay by Sébastien Morlighem published in 2022 by Éditions Non Standard that aims to “highlight the irrepressible rise, in France, between the time of the Enlightenment and the beginning of the 20th century, of a form, a thousand-faceted kind of writing, which is often taken for granted and flourishes in common existence.” A rich variety of sans serif forms, often incidental to the image, are shown in three hundred years of paintings of urban landscapes, printed ephemera, and street photography. Most of the book’s 356 pages are images, but it concludes with an essay and image credits, set in Moulin in both French and English, where the ambiguity of its flared stroke endings allows it to fit the book’s content as a contemporary interpretation of serifless letters, while standing apart thanks to its sculptural texture. 

The same year, Moulin appeared with another typeface by Nugue, Orientation, in the Trans(m)issions exhibition at the MO.CO., a contemporary arts center in Montpellier, France. Whereas Orientation was originally designed for real-world, physical uses like signage and wayfinding, but later proved it could also work well in other mediums like film and publication design, Moulin took an inverse route: conceived with more intimate environments like books and screens in mind, its use set large for wall text suggests that its personality is strong enough to scale up. After starting out in the Vault as a single weight with an italic, Moulin was expanded to a complete range in seven weights, from Thin to Super, with matching italics, after which it moved to the main library.