P22 Type Foundry is truly a gem in YouWorkForThem’s catalog of impressive foundries. P22 has won dozens of awards–once winning 11 in a single year–and maintains partnerships with over a dozen museums including The Guggenheim, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and other world-famous museums and galleries.
What makes P22’s work so fascinating is that their production process is like no other foundry’s. P22’s stated goal is “to present historical materials in a contemporary, relevant form,” which they achieve by looking at archival materials and artistic works and using them as inspirational material to produce fonts which evoke time periods, famous persons, and artistic movements as a whole. Equipping their foundry not only with talented typographers, but also fully staffed research teams, they have proven time and time again that they are fully up to this task.
The foundry began in this way, producing a series of fonts in 1994 based off of the surrealist artists Marcel Duchamp and Joan Miró. P22 examined the shapes, symbols and aesthetic flair in both their handwriting as well as their paintings themselves. The Duchamp font attempted to evoke Duchamp’s dedication to methods of random selection and appropriation, in a kind of self-referential homage. The Miró font sought out a full alphabet from the shapes and forms found throughout his “Constellation” series of paintings. Both fonts were incredibly successful and gave P22 the opportunity to produce two unique fonts for museums–a Josef Albers set created in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum and a “Daddy-O” “beatnik” set for the Whitney Museum of American Art–a project which would catapult the foundry into the stardom it experiences today.
YouWorkForThem has a number of P22’s beautiful, evocative fonts on offer. While one can only grasp the true breadth of their work by looking at their catalog, the three fonts Marcel, Constructivist, and Dada do well to illustrate the wide range of their work.
Marcel is named after Marcel Heuzé, a Frenchman who wrote a number of letters to his wife back in rural France while he lived and worked in a German camp where he had been conscripted to manual labor. Designer Carolyn Porter attempted to capture the love and intimacy expressed in those letters, despite the scars and stains of the censor marks made by his captors, by keeping the original artistry of Marcel’s handwriting. In the end, years of research went into this font, which is made up of over 1300 glyphs, in order to produce an artistic work that is at once historical, beautiful, and highly readable.
Constructivist draws its name and style from the Soviet-era Russian art movement of Constructivism, and its prominent artists such as Rodchenko and Popova. The movement, coming out of Russian Futurism, saw a distinct need to consider art not as some autonomous process by individual genius, but rather a productive process by the people and for the people. The Constructivists thus produced art in the name of industry, designing some of the most famous fonts, cinema, and architecture of the period. The Constructivist font by P22 echoes this obsession with “producing for industry” by drawing out familiar industrial themes to be found during the period while producing a beautiful, original font.
Dada has seen three published versions since the first in 1996. Inspired by the randomness of the Dadaist movement in 1920s Europe, the font features over 500 glyphs and images from which the “random” aesthetic can be achieved. By tweaking a number of options related to the font such as contextual alternates, ligatures, small caps and tilting, a simple word morphs into a true Dadaist artwork in astounding emulation of the masters.
Please contact us to learn more about the truly inspired fonts that we have on offer from big name foundries with bold ideas.
