The Henderson is a proprietary typeface family designed by Jean François Porchez for the number two management and strategic consulting worldwide firm in 2006, in association with The Creative Factory.
This typeface family is designed to convey a strong personality to the company communication tools. It asserts The group’s faith in progress and modernity while remaining true to its heritage and history. It contributes both to strengthening company’s presence in the market and to enhancing the reader’s comfort through increased clarity and readability.
5 weights family.
Henderson – built in TrueType OpenType format – family take its roots on the work of John Baskerville. He was an English punchcutter who invented a new typeface around the middle of the 17th century and several new technics to print on coated paper. There are various interpretations of Baskerville today, most of them have been created in “several sizes” for metal typesetting. Later, with phototypesetting, only one master was designed for all sizes. That’s why the current contrast of the ITC New Baskerville used previously is slightly too high and not perfectly suitable to text setting on contemporary coated paper. The Henderson Serif, more contemporary in its interpretation increases legibility in text settings. Henderson Serif is set at 11 pts equal to ITC New Baskerville set at 12 pts in optical size, but more economical in widths.
Historical typefaces such as Baskerville feature a small xheight (the size of the small lowercases), whereas today sanserifs feature large xheight as Arial, a common sanserif used by the company. In our present case, its seems more appropriate to keep Arial as a reference due to its capacity to be easily used on screen and everyday office documents.
Started with a family of 4 weights in 2007, 4 new weights have been added in 2009 at client request.
Based on Henderson Serif, itself based on Baskerville, Henderson Sans can be definite as one of the first transitional sanserif, at mid distance between humanistic sanserifs like Gill Sans and grotesk sanserifs like Helvetica and Arial. Henderson Sans still remain close to Arial, in a sense that Henderson Sans is based on an ancestor style of Arial. Henderson Sans structure is modulated and its terminals not yet structurally well organised while its design is already clean and net. Finally, Henderson Sans can easily be switched from Arial back and forth.
Furthermore, Henderson Serif and Sans are built on the same structure and the same proportions to be easily exchanged at anytime without too much effect on layout and text length and size.
Henderson is a proprietary typeface who will never be made available to the general public.
The Mencken family was created by Jean François Porchez for The Baltimore Sun in 2005. The first objective was to replace the previous custom fonts designed in the middle of the nineties which, according the reader survey conducted by The Sun, was one of the first points of dissatisfaction. Focus groups conducted during the redesign period liked the Mencken family; tests with online reader panels showed 75 percent preferred Mencken over the previous Sun typefaces. After the redesign launch, The Sun has received lots of feedback. Some reader response was particularly enjoyable: “It’s easier to read with the new type even though the type is designed by the French.”
The Mencken family include various members, each of them specially designed for their own function. See the dedicated page created by The Sun at the launch of the redesign.
Mencken Text (in addition the subhead) is a low contrast Transitional-style typeface designed with an oblique axis, an emphasis on horizontals and possesses open counters. The Text family features more Didonesque capitals to harmonise with the Head versions.
Mencken Head (and various narrow widths) is a high contrast typeface designed in the style of the Didot (typical french typeface from the end of 18th century) not so common in North America today. The objective was to make more legible and simple headlines with a unique flavour.
A multi-format typeface family, Mencken appears in OpenType format, as well as Type 1 PostScript and TrueType (Type 1 and TrueType formats contain a special encoding for fractions as well as several additional fonts for small caps and all caps).
The family’s name Mencken is a tribute to H.L. Mencken’s journalistic contributions to The Sun. According to the London Daily Mail, Mencken ventured beyond the typewriter into the world of typography. Because he felt Americans did not recognize irony when they read it, he proposed the creation of a special typeface to be called ironics, with the text slanting in the opposite direction from italic types, to indicate the author’s humour.
Prizes
Mencken won a Creative Review Type Awards in January 2006.
Availability and licences
Mencken is a typeface family who was in exclusivity for The Baltimore Sun until September 2008. Now can be used for any kind of projects under certain conditions. Please contact us directly for your specific requests and licences questions.
Vuitton Persona is an all-capital two-color custom font designed by Jean François Porchez for Louis Vuitton Malletier in 2007-08, a French luxury fashion and leather goods company. The typeface was designed to fulfil the needs of the Special orders department, “Mon Monogram.” Hand-painted stripes and monograms are part of the Vuitton heritage, and it was natural to apply this to new technologies. The new typeface was created in order to rediscover historical in-house letterforms from the early 20th century.
The Vuitton Persona typeface is part of a service launched in 2008: clients can now order unique bags with their initials and select two-color combinations in particular shops and via their website from January 2010. The initials are printed with high-quality ink on the famous “Monogram canvas” before hand assembly of the final bag or luggage.
The typeface was designed in OpenType format with a unique feature, specifically developed for the two-color letters. Because the font is delivered with all letters and their meticulously designed shadows, it was necessary to develop an easy method to set texts directly in applications without the need of the glyph palette or layout modification. The user just keys each letter, followed by an equal sign, and the contextual feature is applied, with corresponding shadows appearing in the right position.
Because of the canvas material as the final medium and high level of Louis Vuitton production, the typeface is designed to be set only between 2 and 4 cm high. Others optical sizes are on the way.
Press coverage. Check the LV album about Mon Monogram on Facebook.
Prize
Vuitton Persona was selected for the Palmarés 2009, Club des directeurs artistiques
Copyright
Typeface designed for exclusive use by Louis Vuitton Malletier and will never be publicly available.
Started 2006, finished in 2009: Retiro, by Jean François Porchez, was specially designed to gives a unique voice of the Madriz magazine. Its a city magazine distributed in high class hotels, airports and others hip places in Madrid. Bilingual, Spanish–English, its main object is to offer to local and foreign readers ideas to go out, fashion, interior design and gossips. The layout take its roots from women magazines style with a touch of vernacular style. To achieve that, an hispanic Didot fill out perfectly its job by the association of the usual Vogue strength plus the south Spain cities ornaments and style. Many alternates and ligatures has been added to the family.
The typeface was in beta version until autumn 2009: the final version was fully revised and many variations have been added to the original design to achieve the highest level of excellent in term of editorial settings.
This exclusive typeface will may available to the public in 2015.
Parisine has been designed by Jean François Porchez in 1996 for Ratp to solely fulfil the unique needs of signage legibility. In 1999, the family was revised and extended for use in maps and external communication. Not connected with Ratp, Parisine Plus PTF appeared also in 1999. Much later, Parisine Office (for exclusive use by RATP until public availability in June 2008) was created for Ratp’s internal and external communication. Now, the next step has been to create an OpenType version of the original Parisine. The glyph set has surpassed the usual 250 to a size of more than 700, which allows for the composition of numerous Latin-script European languages. Along with small caps available in all weights, 4 sets of figures are provided–lining and oldstyle–in tabular and proportional widths, depending on the version. Miniscule lowercase and figures for automated fractions, are also included.
Bienvenue has been designed by Jean François Porchez in 1996 for Ratp to solely fulfil the unique needs of signage legibility. In 1999, the family was revised and extended for use in maps and external communication. is an exclusive corporate typeface designed in 2000 by Jean François Porchez for France Telecom, the leading French telephone & internet company. The new family was developed in conjunction with Landor Associates, who redesigned the corporate identity. It is intended for use in all France Télécom communication and advertising. The typeface features a family of 4 variations plus a brand names font, a semiserif titling font & a picto font. Bienvenue is a proprietary typeface for France Télécom and will as such never be made available to the general public.
Lion is a exclusive corporate typeface designed for Automobiles Peugeot. The new typeface, developed in conjunction with EuroRSCG Design, Paris, is used by Peugeot for all the brand names used on their cars: from their classic brand numbers 206, 806 to their special range Partner, Boxer, etc. The typeface is in a bold script style with an strong slope and generous width (1998-99.) Its an exclusive typeface of Peugeot who never will be available.
The Costa PTF is typeface family began life in 1999 as a corporate typeface for Costa Crociere, an Italian cruise company who still use it for many of their communication needs. The objective was to develop a typeface that allowed all of the material to be easily recognisable despite various stylesheets and layouts. The style of typeface came from the ligatured logotype Costa designed by Landor Associates in 1999. The immediate answer was to design disconnected letters and to add some unusual glyphs such as k, v or E in order to give a unique colour to the text. The idea was to create a sort of mediterranean style of typeface. Using the structure of a somewhat modernised Italian Chancery script to which only the ending serif remained. The serif being more of a flourish creating contrast and referencing the more exotic countries such as those which Costa Crociere present in their catalogs. Costa ptf is a style without neutrality and doesn’t fit comfortably into any typeface classification – this proves to be the novelty of its design as well as guaranteeing its originality.
