After a successful full day of type and graphic design conferences at Now25, we were delighted to welcome the new TypeParis Summer25 edition, a program set to run for six weeks! Last Tuesday, 3 June 2025, all attendees had their initial meeting with some of the instructors for the Summer25 programme, Gina Serret and Jean François Porchez. They introduced humanistic calligraphy and highlighted its significant role in achieving a strong understanding of type design.
Attendees also met instructors Mathieu Réguer and Julie Soudanne. Under their guidance, students continued to enhance their calligraphy skills, complementing this learning by drawing a modular humanistic alphabet. This initial stage concluded with all participants receiving the briefings for their personal typeface projects.
Calligraphy as a Foundation
Immediately following a general introduction by Jean François Porchez to this summer program, Gina Serret as special instructor for calligraphy joined Jean François to begin teaching humanist calligraphy with a broad-nib pen. This practice is fundamental for understanding the elements that compose the Latin alphabet. Essentially, calligraphy is crucial for learning to identify the fundamental strokes of the Latin writing system: the precise position of the broad-nib pen on the paper and the ductus while forming each letter will significantly influence the resulting letterforms in type design.
Gina Serret provided a demonstration of the Caroline model to the attendees, offering practical and essential tips useful for type design. The practice of humanistic calligraphy then progressed to an introduction of a Renaissance minuscule model we developed as source to understand the structure of letterforms. This began with small sizes and later moved to a larger, precise size, which attendees would use to draw their letters over. This shift in format allowed attendees to start exploring the tensions, curvature, and proportions of humanist letterforms in a more detailed way.
Key for Humanist Typeface
Once the task of the large-size humanist calligraphy was well accomplished, attendees began drawing the finest letterforms from their own humanist calligraphy onto tracing paper. Through this traditional hand-drawing technique, they were able to understand the structure and stabilize and refine the shapes of their letters. They also carefully studied and reconstructed letter proportions, weight, contrast, endings, and serifs. Throughout this process, they had the constant option to refer back to calligraphy, an infallible method for ensuring well-built letterforms and excellent curves.
The outcome: they ultimately developed a coherent system for constructing their own humanist modular alphabet. The primary goals of this first exercise were to encourage holistic thinking and to understand all shapes as part of a single, unified system of letters to create and set sentences.
Exploring the Design space programme
By the end of this initial phase of the Summer25 programme, attendees thoroughly enjoyed exploring the Design space programme while expanding their first type design exercise. Building upon each humanist calligraphic alphabet, we delved deeper into the exploration of various attributes and axes of a design space, such as contrast, modulation, serifs, and endings. We sought to understand the extremes of letterforms by designing Thin, Black, High contrast, and Condensed versions.
The Design space programme marks a crucial point for comprehending how a terminal ending can adapt to different contexts or how, for instance, the same serif needs to be delicate in a High contrast version but thick and short in a Black weight for text. Attendees found the typographic design discoveries very rewarding and learned in a highly satisfactory manner.
Subsequently, as they transitioned to the next project, they also gained professional proficiency in converting their hand-drawn sketches on tracing paper into digital outlines using Bézier curves in Glyphs app and immediately working with masters and interpolation.
Developing a brief for a new Typeface
It was also time to construct a consistent typeface brief, which will guide our work for the following four weeks of the programme. To provide attendees with specific resources and type specimens, the group visited the Typofonderie library in Clamart. Jean François assisted the attendees in discovering valuable resources for their upcoming projects.
As previously mentioned, the culmination of this first phase of TypeParis Summer25 arrives with the submission of these briefs for the next typeface projects. Are you following us for phase 2?
– By Gina Serret
