Responses by Émile Doyon, designer, and Maude Turgeon, director and designer, Demande Spéciale.

Background: The site was part of a campaign for type foundry Pangram Pangram’s newest update of Neue Montreal. It never really did anything special for the release of Neue Montreal and wanted to give the font its moment. To mark the occasion, we created a campaign based around Neue Montreal as a destination, a play on Montréal and Neue Montreal. We created the official Neue Montreal travel guide, highlighting its details and versatility with a Canada modern lens. Each campaign we create with Pangram Pangram comes with 40 visuals, but this particular one also came with its own microsite that gave us the playground to bring the assets and typeface to life. We also had the chance to do a print campaign on the streets of Montréal, which was really fun to be able to see it on different support.

Design core: The site’s objective was to showcase all the special features and details of the typography through our “travel guide” lens. Each section shows a different side of the fonts, sometimes through interactions or through design. We took a lot of our inspiration from the Canada modern movement, but more specifically from old Expo ’67 archives—old postcards we had, an actual passport of the event and pastiches of old posters. The design and layout of the site serve as a way to communicate information and stories about the font but also as an example of how it can be used.

Favorite details: The ligature section. We really like the animation, the color combination and the nod to the metro system, which was part of our inspiration. We also really like the mouse hover detail on the menu that animates the weight of the font in a nice, discreet way.

Challenges: Sometimes, the more challenging is deciding what visuals will make it or not. We create so any visuals when we play with Pangram Pangram’s fonts. We try a lot of things, and sometimes visuals we love don’t make it in the end because they don’t add anything or don’t make sense on the microsite as a whole.

New lessons: We learn each time we do anything, but for this specific project, we learned more technically. We used 3-D in a way we never did before. And working with typography on the web is always tricky; we had to experiment with when we should use real text or when we should use Lotties instead.

We also tried to change our approach overall. Previously, we did a microsite for PP Frama—another Pangram Pangram font—and we made a lot of animation and tried to showcase the font with a lot of unnecessary stuff. This time, we wanted to use a more minimalistic approach and focus more on showcasing the font itself instead of making it about the visuals.

Navigation structure: The navigation is really simple because the site is a one pager, so we had the idea to show the weights of the typography with it. It gives a second use to the navigation elements.