Vendôme Nouveau, chapter four: a Typeface, Reborn

Vendôme Nouveau: a four-chapter series on the life, death, and resurrection of a classic French typeface. Over three chapters, we followed Vendôme from its rise at Fonderie Olive to it losing its sharp edges and its long, long revival. In this final chapter, we look at how Vendôme Nouveau lives from here on out, on the screens and pages of today.

After twenty years, the release marks the end to years of drawing, redrawing, deciding, reconciling, recreating. But more than that, it marks the beginning Vendôme Nouveau’s life. The scattered, half-finished fragments finally become a whole. A complete, expansive system with three axes at once — weight, width and optical size — each with accompanying italics. A hundred and twenty six styles, the largest serif system Production Type has ever published, designed to exist in both harmony and contrast when necessary, from the smallest of captions to the largest of displays. Vendôme Nouveau is alive, out in the world.

It’s built to work everywhere a designer might need it. A system of systems, The Caption styles, for instance, illustrate the sheer capacity of Vendôme Nouveau. They were designed to keep the buoyant spirit of the original at the smallest sizes while shedding some of the Display flourishes that would clog up in fine print.

In editorial, publishing, branding, Vendôme Nouveau dances on the pages and holds the audience’s attention, but stays predictable and functional when it needs to be. It can set a magazine, carry a book, hold a page of running text at the small sizes, which the original never equipped to do. A typeface that deserves not only to be remembered but also to be used in contemporary settings. “It’s a typeface for now,” Jean-Baptiste says, “not a typeface that’s only a reflection of the past. It’s one that has a history but exists for now, and looks into the future.”

And Vendôme Nouveau was never a single object with a finish line — it’s part of a longer continuum of work, larger stream of design with Vendôme Nouveau being its core in this moment. A project that predates the existence of the foundry, its influence runs through a line of Production Type’s contemporary French serifs: Tesseract, Newsreader, Super Castel and more carry traces of it. Like we said, the release isn’t the end of the story. It’s a moment in the continuum, with more to come.

Where exactly Vendôme Nouveau goes from here, Jean-Baptiste, Léa and Charly say they’d rather not guess. It passes from the hands of a long line of designers at Production Type to those who will take it and use it. But one thing is certain: Vendôme Nouveau has much to say. It has places to be and people to see.