Montreal font | R, as in “staircaseR”

A high steeple for the little “n”. The big wheel for the big O. A beautiful Q above the window. An Olympic Stadium that rises in X and enough stairs to draw at least eight stylized letters. For a project as didactic as it is graphic, students from UQAM found inspiration in the city to create a typeface that is truly Montreal.

Judith Lachapelle
The Press

C, as in “creation in confinement”

Professor at the UQAM School of Design, Amandine Alessandra moved to her adopted city at a strange time: in the spring of 2020, when Montreal was in confinement. For this typography specialist who is interested in collective creation, this constraint posed quite a challenge. “But I’ve come to realize that a lot of people are finding ways to be creative in a group, while being remote. I then wondered how to do group typography in this context. In London, where she lived before moving to Montreal, she had already done a project with elementary school students who had walked around their neighborhood taking pictures of letters of the alphabet. In Montreal, circumstances led her to be paired with students in the science of education at UQAM.

M, as in “show me that”

The future teachers therefore went for a walk in the city looking for letters. Not those, already all traced, which are displayed on signs or posters. Those which hide in the landscape, and which reveal themselves with a little imagination. Wrought iron arabesques, lintels, skylights, an assembly of beams… “For example, you can easily find “M” in the “sitting dogs”, on the roofs of houses”, says M^me Alexandra. By videoconference, they showed their discoveries, chose a shape for each letter, and wrote a few words to highlight it.

R, Y and the stairs

P, as in “pass the puck”

Once the primer was completed, the graphic design students revealed the letters hidden in the images of their peers in education to create this unique typeface. And free, says M^me Alessandra, who wants everyone who wants to download and use this creation. “We created a typeface as a group that goes back to the collective, since it is free of copyright and that everyone can use it. »

Other Montreal fonts

New Montreal

The graphic designer Mathieu Desjardins, creator of this typeface accessible under license, writes on his site that he was inspired by the design currents circulating in the metropolis since Expo 67. His creation was notably adopted by the team CF Montreal soccer club.

Universe

For a long time, this typeface created by a Swiss typographer in 1957 was used to display the names of stations in the metro on the black bands. In recent years, with the overhaul of signage in the STM network, Transit font is used on new signs.

J, as in “jasons joual”

Since this spring of 2020 when they participated in the workshop, the students have become teachers. And some, in turn, taught the children to “see” letters in the landscape. “It was also, for me, an opportunity to discover the Québécois language! laughs the designer. The typeface precisely bears a name inspired by local speech: Placoter. “And I find that it doesn’t look like the alphabets I’ve done in other cities. It’s really specific to Montreal. »

The Big Letter HuntLondon

Before creating a Montreal primer, Amandine Alessandra created two in London – one in the center of the city, the other in the East – which were collected in a picture book. In the East London district, she teamed up with an architect to carry out the project with children. “East London isn’t the nicest part of town. But it’s a popular neighborhood that’s beautiful in its own way, and we thought it was important for children to recognize their neighborhood in a book. »

One city, a thousand typos

There are those who take inspiration from the city to create new typography, and there are those who celebrate the heaps of typography already present in the city. The Instagram account Typo Montreal is interested in this “urban typography”. “It’s a way of telling the story of the city from the typography of shop signs,” says designer Zachary Piña, who started the Montreal branch of the Chilean project TypoValpo in 2019 with his friend Cristina Vergara. Twice a week, Zachary Piña and his collaborators transmit their findings to the account’s hundreds of subscribers. If Zachary Piña is particularly fond of old signs, others, more recent, are the work of lettering artists, such as the painter-poster designer Claude Dolbec, who in 2018 was the subject of a documentary on this fascinating profession.