Garalda

Designed by Xavier Dupré. Released 2016.

Garalda is a charming family that renews a legacy of finesse. Its workaday personality encourages easy long-form reading, but this reinvented Garamond is certainly not basic. Experimentation yielded a contemporary family with heritage.

Read more about the background and development of Xavier Dupré’s Garalda in our blog here.

Une histoire oubliée: la genèse française du terme « film noir »

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Un film noir est un film qui, dans les années quarante et cinquante, montre avec pessimisme la corruption de la société américaine, et se caractérise par une esthétique du noir et blanc.

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2) Film noir et littérature. Le personnage principal du film noir, le détective privé a été créé dès le dix-neuvième siècle. Son ancêtre est le chevalier Dupin (Edgar Poe), ses aînés, Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle) et Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie). Mais avec eux, nous avons affaire au roman problème : par un jeu intellectuel semblable à celui des échecs, le détective se sert d'indices pour découvrir la vérité. Il use de son raisonnement et de ses déductions. Une telle littérature s'adapte mal à l'écran, qui demande le mouvement avant tout.

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La montée du gangstérisme (thème des films des années trente) et la corruption urbaine inspirent à l'écrivain américain Dashiell Hammett cinq romans majeurs publiés entre 1927 et 1930, et qui tranposent l'univers du détective des beaux quartiers aux décors sordides des grandes villes populeuses : Le Grand Braquage, La Moisson rouge, Sang maudit, Le Faucon maltais, La Clé de verre. Son héros est Sam Spade.

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The Backstory

Garalda

A charming 21st century family that renews a legacy of finesse.

Type designer Xavier Dupré’s Garalda font family is a charming 21st century design that renews a legacy of finesse. As paragraphs on a page, Garalda’s overall impression is of a workaday personality, committed to the main purpose of the job: easy long-form reading. But setting it in display sizes proves something different: This reinvented Garamond is anything but basic.

The Garalda story begins with the serendipitous finding of a book typeset in a rare Garalde, called Tory-Garamond, with which Dupré was not immediately familiar. This Garamond was used in bibliophile books in the decades surrounding 1920, but after that it became déclassé for an unknown reason.

Dupré found the italic styles especially charming and discovered the family was probably the mythical Ollière Garamond cut from 1914. He obtained low resolution scans of the typeface and used them, rather than high resolution scans, as the basis for his new type family. This allowed Dupré the mental freedom to experiment and remix as he saw fit, culminating in a contemporary family with heritage.

As seen in the simplistic rectangular serifs, Garalda is an humanist slab serif, but with a mix of angles and curves to give the classic shapes a fresh, unorthodox feeling. While almost invisible in paragraph text, these produce a graphic effect in display work.

The set of ligatures in the roman and italics lend themselves to unique display use, such as creating lovely logotypes. In the italics, some swashes inspired by different historic Garamonds are included, sometimes breaking their curves to be more captivating. Just look at how the italic ‘*-s’ ligatures create ‘s’ with a cursive formation rather than merely a flowing slant. And how the roman ‘g’ link swings as wide as a trainer’s whip. These are all balanced by squared serifs in the roman to keep an overall mechanised regularity.

The Garalda family comes in eight styles, includes some of the original arrows and ornaments, and speaks multiple languages for all typesetting needs, from pamphlets to fine book printing. The complete Garalda family, along with our entire catalogue, has been optimised for today’s varied screen uses.

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