Mars

Mars is a sturdy interpretation of select vernacular signs from North America. Its designer Alaric Garnier blended diverse flavors — conjuring the rocky beaches of Seattle, the streets of New Orleans, and eventually the harbor of Marseille, France.

Mars came to life in 2016 as a 2-widths minifamily, with one cut for each width. The dynamic duo consisted of a pumped-up extended style, and a slimmer condensed. A “Standard” width cut joined the pack in 2021. These three cuts were designed to work together, while maintaining their own singularity in a wide variety of design projects.

10 years ago in New Orleans, Garnier came across a metal typeface named Venus at John Fitzgerald’s letterpress studio. Fresh out of school, Garnier was visiting the workshop to print his first business cards. Fitzgerald only had four complete lead typefaces to compose the card, and Venus instantly captivated Garnier.

When Garnier returned to France, he began researching the genre in which his references evolved, and took inspiration to create his own interpretation. This creation features traits that are unique to Garnier’s design intentions: a large x-height, a robust “Regular” cut, and generally low contrast between thick and thin strokes. Most notably, it had sharp terminals; a distant echo of American Gothics, the sans-serif alphabets used by American sign painters. Garnier instilled most of his style in the Condensed series. While some of his references were very “industrial,” in the sense that the O’s are flat-sided, Garnier gave Mars a handcrafted appearance, with elliptical O’s, rather than rectangular ones.

Mars’ unique aesthetics stem from its singular drawing logic and its shape progression across four widths: Condensed, Standard, SemiCondensed, and Extended. The uppercases almost follow a distinct design rule where every stroke has to be beveled. This feature is especially striking in its capital letters E, F, G, L, T, and Z. In the lowercase design, the stroke connections stand out. In its narrower width, they appear ultra-smooth, while in wider widths, they adopt an angular character with a distinctive two-stroke ductus. Many glyphs in Mars share flared terminals as a design feature. These stroke endings are visible in c, e, f, g, s, y, C, G, J, S, 2, 3, 9. A discerning user also ought to notice the trapezoidal shape of the i and j dots.

Font release campaign visuals by Jessica Coifman.
Models: Almaz Papatakis, David Jeannot and Octave Lauret.