Vendôme Nouveau, chapter three: The Resurrection

The first inklings of a new life for Vendôme appear in 2007, when Jean-Baptiste Levée makes some sketches. The idea is quite simple with a rather brutal implication: not to scan it, but to redraw it from the best surviving sources.

He inherits incomplete, incoherent fragments of Vendôme, scattered across specimens that frequently disagree, missing in places with gaps in whole sizes. Which isn’t necessarily surprising, seen as Vendôme originally existed only in a handful sizes and weights, some never drawn at all. But the project is still difficult to envisage: reviving Vendôme into a whole, functioning family means building everything that is missing: every size, every width, every weight, each with its italic.

Vendôme Nouveau stays in the works longer than the foundry has existed. Naturally, it passes through the hands of a long trail of designers under Jean Baptiste Levée’s direction. Each of them carry the project a little further before passing the baton. It is Léa Bruneau and Charly Derouault who are the last in this tour de force. They’re handed a vast, fragmented project with immense lore and asked to pull it across the finish line. By the time Vendôme Nouveau reaches them the scale is enormous, “a monster,” they remember thinking when they first opened the files.

Léa and Charly begin their resuscitation work with Display, the largest and most extreme cut, with all the flare and sharpest of edges. Then they go into Caption, the smallest — which, because it never existed in the original, has to be derived, redesigned, pared back, and straightened from the Display. Then, the designers conjure Text in the space between Caption and Display, interpolate it so that the straight and the flared meet in the middle.

“Interpolate.” Sounds more straightforward on paper than it is in practice. For the software to interpolate between two styles and make it into a third, the two styles need to share some significant infrastructure — the same number of points placed to correspond. Vendôme’s construction doesn’t exactly line up. The same letter in the Display and the Caption are essentially two different drawings, so before the machine could interpolate, the designers reconcile the extremes by hand to make them match closely enough to blend.

There is also no single Vendôme to refer to for the final decision. The original letters survive only in old printed specimens, and the specimens don’t always agree with one another. “Take five of the same letter from the same source — same metal, same size — and you get five different shapes,” Léa says. Ink spreads, impressions shift, the ‘e’ on one line is not the same as the one on the next. So, the designers have to triangulate: they have to hold the contradicting specimens against the drafts they’d inherited, and then both of those against the most elusive thing to fully ascertain: what the design was trying to be. To settle on a letter is to interpret.

These inconsistencies caused by human error and sheer circumstance make the project increasingly difficult, but things that make Vendôme Vendôme also present a challenge to a revival of this size. Its serifs are uneven, the resulting rhythm seemingly obeys no logic. If you copy them to the letter, it’s sign painting and not a fully functioning typeface. If you smooth them all away, you erode the font’s spirit. So, every letter becomes a judgement call. We keep the plunge of the V, easy. Smooth a lumpy terminal, but was it drawn like that on purpose? Let a serif stay a little dangerous.

Thousands of decisions to mark the difference between merely scanning a typeface into digital and recreating it into full functionality, breathing new life into it. Out of this long, drawn out operation comes Vendôme Nouveau: faithful to the original but also unavoidably, unmistakably new.

Up next: Where does Vendôme Nouveau go from here?