A bigger Place

Almost immediately after we released Julien Priez’s Place, we started hatching a plan to make an even more dramatic display variant. Place Display is a concise family in just one weight—Regular—and, like Place, it features both roman and blackletter capitals in an alternate set aptly named “Extra.” Narrower and more sinewy than its confrere, Place Display is ideally suited for logotypes, colossal headlines, and public lettering.

A telegraphic brief provided the impetus for the original family. After reviewing the Commercial Type library, Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz wanted to add a serif typeface that embodied both width and conventional notions of elegance. And so that became Julien’s assignment. The partners kept the brief deliberately loose to harness the French designer’s unbounded creativity and ability to come up with unforeseen shapes, as well as his comprehensive knowledge of type history, calligraphy, and graffiti. Julien came back with a wide, lowish-contrast serif that projects both street cred and luxe.

Place is the fruit of an intense period of research that sent Julien foraging through Gutenberg-era printed and written books for ideas about how best to fashion wide letters. Following the model of Lombardic drop caps and uppercase blackletter structures, he filled practice sheet upon practice sheet with similar curves using a broad-edged pen, noticing that the contrast spread more or less evenly across the letterforms. This convinced him to give Place a rather low degree of contrast, increasing the range of sizes it can comfortably maneuver. Its four distinct weights facilitate complex typography—from subheads and deks to running text and page furniture. Its versatility means that it can play both supporting and principal roles.

Place Display, on the other hand, is indisputably a star. It lives in the same general neighborhood as other ambitious, operatic display faces in our library like Marian, Eugenia, and Schnyder. It’s confident enough not to need more than a single weight. One of Julien’s objectives was to arrive at a weight that would be perfectly balanced for a logotype, similar to what Dino Sanchez and Christian attempted with the Luxury typeface they published with House Industries in the early aughts—but without a trace of irony. 

Julien has retained the Extra blackletter variant here: Because so much of his initial exploration and experimentation revolved around blackletter forms, he felt compelled to integrate them into the entire Place universe. They also offer an innovative and expressive tool for designers. Free-floating, divorced from the more regimented blackletter lower case, the Extra caps’ lyrical curves play beautifully with the rounder forms of the Latin lower case, and even with the Latin capitals. “I think what Julien brings from his calligraphic practice sheets to each digital typeface he draws is a vocabulary of gestures, built up over the exploration process, that can be combined in unexpected or surprising ways, sometimes in the same letterform,” says Christian. “It unlocks an intuitive way of drawing that allows for a leap like combining the blackletter caps with the roman lower case—it’s the same palette of forms, so why not?” 

On his Instagram account, Julian has been imagining how Place Display might look in various contexts, from branding to public lettering. He has also, with cabinetmakers Les Enfants Terribles, been building a prototype of a 3D specimen, dubbed Place’s place, to bring the very analog process of the typeface’s development full circle to something people can touch. Word on the street is that we might use the prototype to make DIY model-making kits. The specimen shows both text and display variants and how each has its place. Unlike its more protean forerunner, Place Display is maybe a little niche. But sometimes we need unabashed bigness, brio—a huge moment we can celebrate.