Michelle Noelke

Etteilla is a whimsical and witchy type revival for use in contemporary text and display. The original source material is an 18th century book printed in Rome that serves as an interpretation guide for Greek anaglyphs. The book caught my eye with its unique layouts and wood carved illustrations scattered throughout. The typeface intrigued me with its beautifully variable texture due to printing irregularities. To my eye, the letterforms had a very circular, bouncing quality to them with a lot of hand drawn personality. Though the text was written in Latin so I couldn’t decipher any of it, I got the impression it contained ancient wisdom and secrets.

I knew it would be a good challenge to try to maintain the charming irregularity to some of the forms while creating a typeface that is legible and stable. I wasn’t sure yet if it would work better in an elegant witchy astrology guide or to typeset a book of spells in Harry Potter but I was excited to explore the possibilities.

While looking into Italian printing history, I came across the interesting history of tarot interpretation and used that as a guide for the look and feel. I learned that tarot cards were originally nothing more than popular playing cards in 15th century Italy called Tarocchi. It was until the 1780’s that the idea that cards held esoteric wisdom caught on. An intellectual of his time named Antoine Court de Gebelin perceived the cards as holding “secrets of the Egyptians” and in published works, offered up a history of tarot that historians have not been able to substantiate. Within a few years, Jean-Baptiste Alliette, a French occultist, tarot reader, and astrologer, took this spark of an idea and ran with it, creating an interpretation guide and dedicating himself to cartomancy or tarot readings. He later published his own deck of cards featuring the reverse of his surname as his pen name, “Etteilla.”

I love the idea that he put his own interpretation on a set of old playing cards, giving fuel to a mystical movement that continues to this day. I used his name as a nod to this era of printing in Italian history, to witchy and whimsical qualities of the typeface I was trying to capture, and to the art of interpretation.

During the process, I found that it was impossible to truly know what the serifs looked like so it was much more effective to zoom out in order to capture the texture of the typeface. For my family extensions, I took inspiration from some of the printing irregularities I noticed originally and decided to make a display that emulates the look of ink pooling on the bottom of the letters. From there, I was encouraged by my instructors to push the idea even further by making a “top heavy” version as well.

Although I wasn’t sold at first on the look of the top heavy letters, the more I drew, the more I realized they created a strong texture in text. After completing enough letters in each master to create words, I was able interpolate between the two to create a reverse contrast. It was a challenge to make sure the center of each letterform remained unaffected by the heavy effect so the interpolation would look clean. I also made a black weight so that I could have another layer of interpolation between the combinations I already created.

In the end, I was pushed to explore more in Glyphs and type design with this revival than I ever thought I could achieve. I’m so grateful to my instructors for pushing me because it helped me learn all of the capabilities of the software and how to approach a project like this more effectively in the future.

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