A beautiful Place

Equipped with this skeletal brief, Julien looked back through both typographic and calligraphic history, surveying natural ways to write wide letters. Several Gutenberg-era books caught his eye, some printed and some written. One was a manuscript on parchment entitled Recueil des histoires de Troie, copied by Pierrot Gousset and illuminated by the Master of Antoine Rolin around 1495. “Logically,” Julien wrote in some notes on the project, “the Lombardic drop cap and blackletter uppercase structure seemed wider than anything else.” Following this model, he experimented with directly tracing a similar curve with a broad pen, discovering that the contrast spread evenly across the letter. “For me,” he added, “designing a typeface from calligraphic research comes from school. Back in 2006, when I was at Estienne, Paris, directed by Franck Jalleau, Margaret Gray, and Michel Derre, we started projects by writing by hand, then fixing the shapes on tracing paper, and finally digitizing the typeface.” Following the same process made sense for this project.

Julien wrote dozens of practice sheets, determining the overall width and curve tension, and experimenting with different sorts of terminal shapes. We jointly decided on using sharp, minimal forms for the terminals: their elegant simplicity reinforces the forward velocity of the letterforms and avoids shapes that might come across as cute or whimsical.

Because many of the widest capitals in Julien’s historical references had been written in blackletter, he was interested in keeping these structures around, at least as a set of alternates. His tests convinced me and Paul that these capitals, included in the Extra variant of each style, could be a useful tool for designers. Removed from the context of the highly structured blackletter lower case, their lyrical curves play against the rounder forms of the Latin lower case, and even the Latin capitals, in an eye-catching way.

“There are cursive blackletters (see gothique bâtarde, or bastarda script), but in the history of blackletter typefaces, it is difficult to find or imagine a blackletter italic drawn to accompany an upright,” Julien noted. His solution was to increase the speed to see what happened to the forms. “Writing faster will help you find shortcuts and simplify a complicated structure,” he wrote. “It helps you find your own way of writing.” The number of strokes naturally decreases as the shapes start to flow from one to the next rather than stopping and starting, and more fluid curves emerge.

The structures of all of the main blackletter genres—textura, fraktur, rotunda, bastarda—were originally developed with a heavy weight in mind, despite their intricate construction. The capitals are normally written slowly, with a wide nib. While modulating his writing speed, Julien also experimented with the width of the nib and the size of the letterforms to help him figure out how to handle the weight range. Looking at examples written by Jan Van den Velde in the early 1600s, he was struck by how a thinner nib naturally led to faster writing and more complex structures. Julien’s process bounced back and forth between manual and digital tools as he developed the system of shapes that make up the Place family.

Many years ago, Dino Sanchez and I worked on a typeface collection as conceptual art project called Luxury, eventually published by House Industries. The collection ironically commented on the uniform aesthetic of luxury brand logos: If they’re so exclusive, why do they look so similar? Since many of these brands started switching over to bold sans serifs in the 2010s, the joke no longer lands the way it once did. Place also engages with the aesthetics of luxury, but centers the beauty that can be found in these generous proportions, without tongue in cheek.