Léon Hugues

Making scripts alive

Now26 ✚

Exploring script typefaces through a personal progression in practice. Each project reflects a different balance between fluidity and control, exploring how expressive forms can evolve into a consistent typographic system. In the end, they all become puzzles, and that’s where the fun begins.

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Biography

Interview ✚

Léon Hugues is a Franco-British type designer and calligrapher whose practice navigates the space between precision and experimentation. Trained in typography and calligraphy at École Estienne under the guidance of Franck Jalleau, he developed a taste for rigour and living letterforms.

As a freelance designer, Léon works with numerous international foundries, developing both expressive retail typefaces and large corporate families. His corporate work maintains a rigorous approach to form and systems, while his personal projects allow for more freedom – exploring ultra-black weights, sharply slanted italics, and unexpected variations. What excites him most is taking a type system to its limits, exhausting its potential to reveal strange and compelling forms inspired by everyday visual encounters, from street lettering to signage.

Fascinated by scripts and the many forms of handwriting, he sees them as both a passion and a puzzle. Beyond a specialty, they are simply fun — a space where gesture, rhythm, and structure meet. His personal calligraphy practice feeds this fascination and his desire to create script fonts that feel alive and contemporary.

His practice also extends to multi-script design, particularly Southeast Asian writing systems such as Lao, Thai, and Khmer, taught to him by Ben Mitchell. He has developed projects in collaboration with NaN.xyz, Cast Foundry, Blazetype, Fontpad, Fontfabric, BAL, Tightype, Writtenshape, and more. His work has been recognised with awards from Le Club des DA and the ISTD, and he also teaches typography at École Estienne.

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