Violaine et Jérémy finds the perfect typographic balance with new release, Voyage

For Violaine et Jérémy, a graphic design studio based in Paris, designing typefaces is “kind of a dream job.” Passionate about the medium itself, the design duos’ love of typography also stems from the fact it’s one of its few chances to act as its own client, allowing the pair to “do what we love, which is designing typefaces that we ourselves would buy and use,” the studio tells It’s Nice That.

The most recent example of this is Voyage, a new typeface the pair describe as “romantic and curvy, like a road trip should be” – a unique description for a typeface we have to admit! Like many of its other releases (you can visit the studio’s type foundry, separate to its practice here), Voyage developed from an unused piece of creative research for a client-focused project, in this case, around “the theme of travelling and the flow of the ocean, the movement of the water.”

Yet, while being free in the typeface’s concept and structure, Violaine and Jérémy didn’t refrain from setting typographic challenges for themselves. Voyage is a complex typeface with many details, full of curves, looping ligatures and flourishes of flare – while somehow not being too much. “The challenge,” the studio tells It’s Nice That, “was finding the right balance with all the curvy lines; making them present and strong enough but not drowning the typeface in them.”

Balance, therefore, became both the main aim and challenge during Voyage’s development. Now completed, in its letterforms the typeface is almost too thick in some places, pulling back to a thinner line mark just before it feels too eccentric. For instance, in its “e”, “h” and “g”, readers can spot real eccentricity in Jérémy’s design which features “hairlines for maximum contrast.”

The result is a typeface the pair describes as “elegant” pointing out how “it’s not too much, it’s not show-off, but it really stands out.” To get to this point, several rounds of testing was required, where the pair could be found designing and redesigning multiple versions of each letter, before deciding “what to choose and what to set aside.” “So, it’s a long process, and a lot of work but that’s what it takes to achieve balance,” the studio adds.

Finally, made up of two weights (bold and regular), and 55 ligatures with 26 variants, each open-type programmed so the user can decide which glyph to alternate, Voyage is a typographic example of “embracing ideas all around the world.” Violaine and Jérémy also hope the typeface will be utilised in large sizes, particularly suitable as a headline font or for short texts. Maybe it “could be beautiful in a movie opening with nice animation along its curves,” they suggest. “Let’s dream of a David Fincher or Sam Mendes movie opening and poster.”