Sharp Type

At the drawing board, Trois Mille began as a test to produce low contrast styles with a high contrast tool.  Rouault’s experimentation with calligraphy led him to a breakthrough: by always orienting the pen at either 0° for horizontal strokes or 90° for verticals, Marc created a system where hairlines only occur at the stroke intersections and some interior strokes and joins, while the rest remain thick.

By utilizing nib-rotation to create monolinear outer strokes and only using the hairline value for stroke joins and some interior strokes and cross-bars, Rouault’s ideation laid the groundwork for a system of contrast methodology we call internal contrast. While some wood-type models and colloquial lettering of the past contain the building blocks of this style, Roualt's calligraphic model served as a vital first step in codifying these disparate construction ideas into a coherent methodology. The spark of this exciting visual style finds its most concentrated expression in the Black weights of Trois Mille. As the Trois Mille weight spectrum goes from Regular to Black, this 90° rotational stroke modulation changes from including horizontal strokes throughout the letterforms to excluding centralized horizontal strokes in the Black weight.

While the quintessential American Grotesks of the wood type era pioneered this technique of thin inner strokes to keep a uniform weight in the heavy outer strokes, Trois Mille formalized this method by applying it to characters like ‘E’ and ‘S’. In the darkest weights, a hierarchy of horizontal contrast values balances characters with multiple thick horizontal strokes that could have otherwise looked too dense.

Echoes of Roger Excoffon’s signature style and sensibilities are found throughout this robust and innovative family. To designer Marc Rouault, Excoffon’s typefaces are simultaneously classic, yet charmingly weird and contemporary for the 20th century. The design of Excoffon’s masterpiece, Antique Olive, was guided by the results of a clinical study of the reading process conducted in the 1950s, which concluded that the top of the bouma (word shape) is the most integral to how the human eye processes Latin text into language. This conclusion informed Antique Olive’s distinctly top-heavy style.