Duration: We started working on the foundry in 2011 but officially launched in 2012.
Location: Montréal, Canada.
Key creatives: We are two type designers: Alexandre Saumier Demers and Étienne Aubert Bonn. Both of us studied graphic design at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Étienne studied at Cooper Union’s Type@Cooper before finishing an MFA in type and media at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. Alexandre worked at the communication research center Fabrica in Treviso, Italy for a year and got an MFA in the same type and media program at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.
Approach: We mostly design typefaces for retail, but we also create lettering, logos and paint signs for local businesses. Anything that has to do with letters is interesting to us. Our vast range of work reflects this: we’ve also created fonts for underdeveloped markets, like native Canadian syllabics with our font Nurraq or Lewis for mathematical typesetting.
Influences: History is a really important part of type design. Nobody in our profession who is alive today can deny its influence on her or his design. What drew us to study type design in the Netherlands is the way Dutch letterers see type as shapes created by a tool—thinking mainly about Gerrit Noordzij’s work—and their studies on how pressure, rotation, angles and tools all influence the resulting letterform. Nowadays, most Dutch people are well aware of typography and its impact on culture.
Philosophy: Go beyond expectations. We are hardly ever satisfied and always push every project further—sometimes too far!