A Beautiful Place

When Julien Priez approached Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz in the fall of 2023 about the possibility of working together, the partners sat down and took a good look at the Commercial Type library. Where were the gaps? What direction could be more developed? Paul and Christian quickly concluded that although the library contained some wide typefaces (see Druk Wide, Review Wide, Caslon Doric Wide) and some families that embodied conventional notions of refinement, like Brunel or Chiswick, there weren’t any serif designs that fully embraced both of those qualities at once. 

“Okay,” they told Julien, “design a serif that is both elegant and wide.” That was it. That was the brief. You’ve gotta have a bit of a brief, after all; a total lack of constraints—a blank page, an empty screen—can lead to paralysis. But Paul and Christian agreed that a bare-bones assignment would best suit the fantastically inventive Julien, author of Abelha (designed with his former teacher Michel Derre) and Boogy Brut (designed with Yoann Minet). Julien came back with Place, a relatively low-contrast display serif for all sizes in four distinct weights with matching italics, plus a variant of each style called Extra that features blackletter capitals.

Julien began his design process by asking some fundamental questions: “What even are wide letters? Where do they come from? What are some intuitive ways of writing wide letters that don’t look stretched?” He immersed himself in Western calligraphic and typographic history, going back to early letterforms appearing before 1500. Poring over the catalog for a 2023 exhibition on printing at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, he kept returning to a manuscript on parchment titled Recueil des histoires de Troie, copied by Pierrot Gousset around 1495. The structure of the Lombardic drop caps and the capital blackletter forms, Julien noticed, seemed naturally wider than anything else. 

Taking the lower left curve—the starting stroke—of an uppercase blackletter C in Gousset’s manuscript as his point of departure, Julien traced the shape with a broad-nibbed pen, noticing that the contrast spread in an even way across the letter. He followed this empirical, manual process throughout the design of Place: first throwing himself into research, then tracing forms by hand, then arranging and synthesizing those shapes on paper, and finally bringing that constellation of shapes into RoboFont for development into a full-fledged digital type family. 

Julien wanted Place to involve blackletter structures not only because they played an important part of his research and helped him think about how to write wide letters that didn’t seem stretched, but also because he found no real precedent for a blackletter italic drawn to accompany an upright, and he wanted to explore that dynamic. The evolution of Julien’s practice sheets over the months, as he threshed out the relationship between the lowercase letters and the Latin and blackletter capitals, convinced Paul and Christian that blackletter caps, included in the Extra variant of each style, would be a useful, expressive tool for designers. You can use them as drop caps; you can set strings of italic caps together for expressive waves of text. This Extra set of capitals also allows for a shift in terrain, making the face particularly adept at constructing logotypes and identities. Though a display face in theory, Place’s fairly low contrast makes it a willing supporting player, acquitting itself well in more utilitarian things like page furniture and other navigational elements. 

Significantly, the lettering and calligraphic parts of this exercise were not so much vehicles of influence as they were active participants in the creative process. The histories of calligraphy and type are not unidirectional; they’re dialogic and intertwined. Early fonts were in a sense skeuomorphs—they attempted to simulate the written hand. These two forms of letter-making—the fresh and original versus the repeatable and copied—have had a complex and symbiotic relationship ever since. It’s this shuttling between the two that interests Julien. Place is a typeface steeped in, informed by, and responsive to typographic and calligraphic history rather than simply a typeface influenced by calligraphy. 

By the way, Julien got the job. He joined Commercial Type in April 2024.