Compagnie
Pyte Foundry · Ellmer Stefan · 2020
A trio of styles distilled from 19th-century French and Swiss wood type Antiques, deliberately preserving the optical naivety and structural oddities of the originals as an aesthetic in their own right.
About
Drawn by Ellmer Stefan and mastered by Edgar Walthert, the three styles trace influences from E. Ploquin, Martin & Coderey, Bonnet & Cie. and Gaston Dubosc, channelled through research by Éric Nunes. Absent overshoots, no optical compensation and occasional collisions with the implied wood block edge are not corrected but amplified, producing what Stefan frames as a faux-naivety that questions the authority of more polished grotesques. Each style carries a generous set of OpenType alternates — ball terminals, shy terminals, touching terminals, single-storey variants and noseless numerals — allowing considered control over the level of strangeness.
Classification
Derived from 19th-century French and Swiss wood type Antiques (grotesques), with extreme contrasts, absent overshoots and deliberate optical naivety that push it firmly into display territory rather than conventional grotesque.