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Type It !
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This approach of mixing the vernacular and the standardised was also taken by foundries, which adapted typefaces to their markets. One noteworthy reference, which gives its name to one of Maligne’s cuts, was the version of Futura sold by Deberny & Peignot. Though the French foundry had licensed the original font from Bauer, it modified it for its market by adding longer ascenders and descenders before retailing it under the name ‘Europe’. With a somewhat similar attitude, Maximage and Yurovsky referred to a range of sources both colloquial and formal, picking and choosing from early 20th-century France and Switzerland, and making them their own. Rather than trying to focus on the imagined historical purity of a shape, Maligne instead provides a series of personal interpretations—but also a playfulness that becomes evident in some of the OpenType variants, which push ideas of variation and redrawing to their limits. Maligne draws on the blend of vernacular and standardisation that runs across the 20th century through the work of anonymous craftspeople and artists, whether letter painters at the turn of the century, punchcutters in a major foundry in the 1930s or graffiti artists in the 1990s. This myriad of interpretations is compiled like a single voice, a fully customisable typeface capable of adjusting its expressiveness to the needs of the century to come.