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Cycles Eirene
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Destiny Coriolis
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Galactica Kuaizhou
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Nanosecond Missionaria
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Gateway Stations Extraterrestrials
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Galaxy Solaris
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Cthulhu Antares
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Vanguard Themisto
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Cylon Raider Star Fighters
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Horsehead Nebula Around the Moons
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Hydora Pandia
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Meteors Despina
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Eurydome Asteroids
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Blazing World Intergalactic
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P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 C/1861 G1 (Thatcher)
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Maglev Sauron
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Electron Machine
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Petaflops Forcefield
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Neuromancer Transpondeur
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Draconian Marauders Uncertainty Principle
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Saturn Vostok
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Dystopy Nemesis
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Humanoid Red Dwarf
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Pandora’s Star Opisthokonta
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Large Diffeomorphism The Hitchhiker’s Guide
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Europa Gravity
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Minotaur Odyssey
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Probability Wärmetod
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Normandy SR1 U.S.S.Enterprise
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Vorian Atreides Founder Reverend Mother Syaksa
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Leucus Rocket
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Pegasus Anchor 9
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Spacetime Ganymede
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Astronautically Star Destroyers
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Non-Euclidian Geometry Quantum Field Theoretics

About Trois Mille

When Trois Mille was first introduced to the world as Marc Rouault’s TypeMedia thesis project in 2016, word got out quickly. In a field where innovation happens very slowly, this was something special. Dynamic. Expansive. Distinctly French. Initially inspired by the great modern master Roger Excoffon, Trois Mille redefined its genre as it transcended it. The novel construction methodology of Trois Mille rippled out into the zeitgeist of contemporary typeface design and moved the needle of aesthetic culture. Now, after 5 years in the making, Trois Mille has grown into a masterfully executed family, spanning 7 weights in 21 widths of roman and italic styles.

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7 weights, 21 widths, 294 total fonts.

Trois Mille Construction

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.

Trois Mille Seperate Sketches

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.

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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.

Antique Olives Samples

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. 

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Trois Mille is a typeface that claims its space. It’s designed to take up as much surface area as possible with measured constraint. Short ascenders and descenders, and tucked tails create an ultra-compact, attention-grabbing texture. Text and headlines are efficiently packed when condensed or expanded.

aaaaaa weights diagonal

In true Sharp fashion, Trois Mille is built out to an expansive range of numerically itemized widths, including 21 widths and 7 weights in roman and italic, for a total of 294 fonts. The family is massive — fast and full of energy. We are proud to present the debut typeface of this once-in-a-generation talent.

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Trois Mille Tile Graphic

Designed in 2020 by Marc Rouault

Version History
V.1 May 2020

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