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ABOUT

Sébastien Marchal

French designer of the free octagonal typeface Commune Nuit Debout (2018). It includes a stencil style "Pochoir" and a Regular solid style. The social motivation behind this typeface:

Commune is a typeface family whose design and construction were inspired by the wood display characters of nineteenth century posters. It was developed during a postgraduate degree in type design at ESAD Amiens in 2008. It includes 240 fonts of various width, weight and designs, but all based on the same structure; it is (almost) voluntarily drawn without any optical correction. The name "Commune" refers to the common, banal, raw aspect of its structure, but also to the Paris Commune (1871), a short but emblematic revolutionary episode during which laws and decrees were put up during their development on the walls of Paris, ensuring daily communication to the citizens (during the 2 months of the insurrection 398 posters were composed at the Imprimerie Nationale).

In early 2016, Sébastien Marchal participated in General meetings that gave birth to Nuit Debout. When the name "Nuit Debout" was chosen on the electronic lists to designate the future occupation of the Place de la République, he immediately chose within his typeface family "Commune" the narrowest version, the most condensed, the one "standing up" (called "Commune B1San 31" in my nomenclature), to shape this name and to design the poster and the emblem of the event. After the first night of successful occupation, people kept coming back day after and it became clear that this movement would last; the comrades asked Sébastien to design new leaflets and posters every day; a myriad of "commissions" appeared one after the other, and in this joyous disorganization, everybody tried to reproduce it as well as possible the Nuit Debout emblem and its type design that nobody could---and for good reason---to find on the net. So he decided very soon to release for free this version of his typeface family "Commune", under Creative Commons license.

Two years after the end of Nuit Debout, this font is now easily available to all thanks to VTF, under the name "Commune Nuit Debout", as a tribute to a movement that has brought hopes, and is more relevant than ever.

Sébastien Marchal at Velvetyne.

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Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type design in France ⦿ Octagonal typefaces ⦿ Sites with only a few free fonts ⦿ Stencil fonts ⦿