Founded in 2016 by Matthieu Salvaggio, Blaze Type is a type design foundry working from Lyon, France. Since then they have continued to collaborate with a variety of design studios and type designers forming an inpressive type catalogue for various type and graphic design projects. Blaze Type’s ethos is to design, produce and distribute beautiful typefaces that will age gracefully and provide timeless functionality over their years of use.
Blaze Type dedicates their time to the design of innovative retail typefaces for both their own Type Catalogue as well as the design of custom typefaces for a diverse range of clients. “We consider typefaces not only as software but also as tools” explains Founder Matthieu. They produce complex font-families with a wide set of glyphs and alternates allowing for them to be used in a fair and flexible way without limitation.
The foundry has produced several type designs that have been used in many great projects defining brands such as the creative studio, Futura. Apoc was select from the Blaze Type Catalogue which was used throughout Futura’s rebrand. ‘Apoc’ was inspired by the lettering made for a cover about the book of Revelations. It has historic links to Humanistic letter shape and proportions, but also offers something refreshingly new in the way the counter-forms are displayed. ‘Apoc’ has a slight quirkiness that normally only handwriting can bring, yet its careful and tested design is perfect for display usage, enlightening layouts and letting the light come through. This font-family works amazingly with covers and text layouts, whether they be books, magazines, music albums or plain visually appealing headlines on websites, as evidenced in Futura’s brand design.
Futura, alongside ‘Apoc’, implemented ‘Surt’ from the Blaze Type catalogue in order to mirror and accurately portray the brand’s hybrid ethos of methodical and unconventional design when creating brands, concepts, images, objects and spaces. Designed by Blaze Type’s founder it is a complex typeface with a large character set offering a great range of possibilities for a wide range of utilities. It was the perfect typeface for the range of Futura’s products and identity due to its adaptability and readability. Similarly, ‘Surt’s adaptability has been demonstrated through its use in Very Deep Records’ cassette sleeves. Inspired by Norse mythology and Scandinavian Architecture, the typeface draws a bridge between a geometric sans and human process in its shape design.
Blaze Typefaces have also been used in a unique installation and public event projects. ‘Zoo’, designed by Quentin Coulombier, was used as part of an installation at the Prague Quadrennial where a group of white trucks that usually transport artworks were turned into an exhibition space in the Central Hall of the Industrial Palace in Prague. The trucks were decorated in the strong and high contrast display typeface in a striking red colour. Inspiration for the typeface came from the lettering raised on the vinyl sleeves of a french jazz music band called ‘Zoo’. The two letters ‘Z’ and ‘O’ establish the construction constraints of the design of the whole character set. ‘Zoo’ combines sharpness and roundness, delicateness and strength making it the perfect attention-grabbing font for this project.
In today’s digital era, Blaze Type are reimplementing the idea of a typeface as a form of “hardware”, questioning the idea of digital distribution and adding another layer of beauty and uniqueness to font design.
