Parisine: Introducing narrow and compressed families
We are pleased to announce the publication of Parisine Narrow and Parisine Compressed! Parisine was born as the parisian métro signage typeface. This family of typefaces has become over years one of the symbols of Paris the Johnston for the London Underground or the Helvetica for the New York Subway. The Parisine was created to accompany travelers in their daily use: ultra-readable, friendly, human while the context is a priori hostile.
The typeface has been used for many years around the world for publishing projects, visual identity, interface design, unrelated to the metro, nor Paris! Moreover, Parisine remains in the leading group of the best sellers at Typofonderie. And many users, true Parisine fans frequently claimed narrower versions whereas this typeface is already intrinsically rather narrow. Their wishes finally are exhausted with these new versions of Parisine available today. The subtle lines and the shapes that made the success of Parisine is now available to be used for powerful headlines such as in magazine design, web pages or posters.
Design strategies for Parisine Narrow and Compress
This extension project in narrow version has been particularly complicated, because it’s never easy to add new things to an existing family not initially designed with this type of variables in mind. Typofonderie’s team started this project in September 2015, including restarting from scratch several times this project, in order to find the design which serves the best respects of the original Parisine while being different.
Benjamin Blaess who conducted the project can testify the numerous changes in our design strategies over months. Indeed, certain details of shapes, counterforms, and different terminals, according to the weights of the original design could not be strictly declined. It is these challenges that make us realize our human limitations to quickly find the right way. As for other projects, Superpolator will have been an important tool that accompanies our work as designers, allowing an increased exigency during design as well as production. The key has been to imagine a design process set up via Superpolator requiring two steps to produce the final versions: a first version started from raw sources and leaded to the second version which allowed to produce the optimal final versions. The process may seem less bizarre, if we know that the Parisine family started from the unique Parisine Bold created in 1995. The other family members having been designed in 1999.
Roxane Gataud and Joachim Vu have also taken positive action in developing the best design possible within the team, working alternately on design development, kerning and final production with Benjamin Blaess. Of course, having designed Parisine original in 1996, then 1999, I took part in these new developments, and its regular reinstatements, remaining the living witness of the soul of Parisine. We confirm with the Parisine Narrow and Compress that a type design project requires a team which knows how to share and exchange for a single purpose, the required quality.
In the coming months, we hope to see the astonished uses of Parisine!
Parisine: Availability of the typeface family
The Parisine OpenType fonts are available in our exclusive PRO version. Download the Parisine specimen in pdf format for full details of these Advanced typography functions. You may enjoy the Try-out version available too.
→ € 55 for any of Parisine styles
→ € 146 for the Parisine or Parisine Narrow or Parisine Compress mini Family of 4 fonts
→ € 267 for the Parisine Narrow or Parisine Compress Family of 8 fonts
→ € 993 for the Parisine Full Family of 32 fonts
¶ Originally published on Typofonderie Gazette, on 6 December 2016. Une version française est également disponible via Typofonderie Gazette.
