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ABOUT

Charles Mazé

Charles Mazé is a graduate of the Type and Media program at KABK, 2009. There, he designed a didone typeface (Bat Font) that has more warmth than classical didones in the hope of making scientific texts set in modern typefaces less boring. He did this by fattening up the italics. After graduation he moved to Brussels but now he is back in Paris.

In 2009, he started a revival of Mercator, a sanserif typeface by Dick Dooijes and G. W. Ovink designed in 1959 at the Amsterdam Type Foundry.

He set up Cataloged in Brussels with Coline Sunier. In 2012, Stéphanie Vilayphiou, Alexandre Leray, Coline Sunier and Charles Mazé co-designed the readable typeface Dauphine Regular, which can be downloaded from Github and Open Font Library. See it in action on the web site of ESAD (Ecole Supérieure d'Art et de Design). Dauphine is a sans-serif font inspired by lettering in late 19th and early 20th century maps. Github link for Dauphine.

He works with Coline Sunier since 2009. They were fellows at the French Academy in Rome's Villa Medici in 2014 and 2015, and are now graphic designers in residency at Contemporary Art Center CAC Brétigny. Charles is part of the teaching staff of Atelier National de Recherche Typographique (ANRT) in Nancy, France.

At Abyme, he published two typefaces:

• Mercure (2010-2021). He writes in 2021: Mercure, designed by Charles Mazé, is the result of an inquiry into Latin epigraphy and the typographic forms associated with that discipline. Epigraphy is the study of écritures exposées (exposed writings), typically ancient or classical inscriptions engraved in stone or metal. The developments in mid-nineteenth century Latin epigraphy required new methods to transcribe classical inscriptions into print, which in turn required and inspired new typefaces. The Caractères Augustaux of 1846, produced by the printer Louis Perrin and the punchcutter Francisque Rey in Lyon, was the first typeface specifically designed for the transcription of the Roman capitalis monumentalis, used for the first time in 1854 in Alphonse de Boissieu's Inscriptions antiques de Lyon. It was soon followed by the Latins épigraphiques of the Imprimerie Nationale (Paris, 1854) and Ferdinand Theinhardt's Monumental (Berlin, 1863). At the same time, in reaction against the use of the prevalent Didot style, some French printers and publishers turned their attention to other typographic sources. While they found suitable models for the lowercase in typefaces produced during the French and Dutch Renaissance, the regain of interest for Roman inscriptions would provide a template for the uppercase. Around 1858, Théophile Beaudoire, sous-directeur of the Fonderie Générale in Paris, published his Elzévir (after the Dutch Renaissance printers Elsevier), one of the first typefaces to define this pattern. Mercure, which is based in part on Beaudoire's Elzevir, also goes back to the epigraphic origins of Perrin's Augustaux. Its Regular and Italic styles are completed by an additional fixed-width style, Transcript, a set of signs and symbols for the transcriptions of Latin inscriptions into print with fragmented, false, broken or missing letters. Mercure Transcript is included with any license of Mercure Regular or Italic. A study of the first three typefaces for Latin epigraphy in France and Germany, written by Charles, will soon be published in the Abyme Revue.
• Berthe (2011-2018). Berthe is designed after another typeface called Série no. 16, whose first cuts were produced at the end of the nineteenth century by the Parisian type foundry Deberny & Peignot. It was engraved by Constant and Auguste Aubert under the direction of Charles Tuleu, the adoptive son of Alexandre Deberny whose mother, Laure de Berny, had bought from her lover Honoré de Balzac the printing house he didn't manage to transform in a profitable company. Série no. 16 quickly became a popular choice among printers and found its way into many editions of classic and popular texts. Review by Hrant Papazian, who wrote that it presents a congenial evolution of the theatrical Didone style of type. Lower contrast, fluid structures, humane proportions. It is like a Didot or Bodoni taking leave of the catwalk and relaxing among friends.. Author of the related article Abîmées (2021).

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Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type design in France ⦿ Modern style [Bodoni, Didot, Walbaum, Thorowgood, Computer Modern, etc.] ⦿ Elzevir ⦿ Books on type design ⦿ Typefaces inspired by the Trajan column in Rome ⦿