Alexandre Kyheng

Aldachka is a text typeface inspired by the flavours of the Pays-Basque, the region of my grandmother. The Pays-Basque has a very strong visual identity starting with the famous green-red colours of the ikurriña and its cross. Less known are the discoïdales, round shaped gravestones featuring crude engravings that are the starting point of this typeface project. Aldachka means “small branch” in euskara and is the name of my grandmother’s house in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Therefore, wanting to go back to these roots, I wanted to create a Basque typeface that could work in text use.

To my surprise Jean François had a few references on Basque engravings in his Typofonderie vault. In addition to that, the amazing book “La Tombe Basque” by Louis Colas and Malou’s “Lettres Baladeuses” made together more reference than what I expected. Unfortunately, there is (almost) no lowercases references to pick from and this had me worried at first. But as the saying goes, I went back to my calligraphy to use these lowercases drawings as starting point and changed my approach. The goal was not to make a Basque text-usable typeface anymore but to create a text typeface in which I had to bring the Basque flavour in.

The discoïdales engravings share some roots with Celtic tombstone engravings (also round shaped) but have been made with very poor tools and not a lot of consistency from grave to grave. The inconsistency of it may be their most consistent aspect. Of course, a few interesting shapes stand out: a low contrast, an almost mono-width aspect letter to letter, flary and simple triangular shaped serifs and some very aggressive cuts on vertical shapes. In addition, you’ll find there the most famous Basque letterforms with the very distinctive A as well as whole collection of ligatures. In other bad news, the nature of the engravings means that there is close to no calligraphy-related shapes.

From this I started trying to blend the strong style of the references with the traditional calligraphy, without much success, changing my serif styles, countershapes spaces and terminals on a daily basis, the famous daily TypeParis grind. After a few late nights fuelled but a lot of coffee, a nice texture started to appear on the pages, and I felt a bit of Basque atmosphere into the letterforms. Still shapes kept moving and handles nudging until a roman regular style took form; still featuring a very ill 8 and an x that didn’t look much better. Between fixing those glyphs or starting a new master, the choice was easy. Therefore, time to go Black. And a new master means going back to calligraphy, which was easier than the regular even though I don’t think I got better at it. And after the Black, a creative “Expressive” master, so there again I pretended that my ongoing masters were fine and started to play with my pre-existing letterforms. For that Expressive weight, only one idea in mind: making it as Basque as I can, flirting with the cliché but still with the impression that they form a happy family together.

Now, the Aldachka Family is composed of a Regular to Black interpolation, an Expressive Regular to an Expressive Black, and a Roman to Expressive weight (tastfuly named Roman, Romannette, Romance, Doesplay, Display and Display Strong). Like me, I hope that you will feel at least a small piece of Pays Basque in this typeface and maybe you will even be able to smell a faraway gâteau basque on a summer afternoon. For me this Aldachka project took me back to forgotten times and brought back a lot of sweet memories, particularly the excitement of queuing with my grandparents for a Glace Lopez next to the beach.

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