Gaisyr: A Beautiful Typeface with Butterfly Serifs ⛲️

Gaisyr resides in the neighbourhood of Romain Du Roi, the typeface of King Louis XIV — or the King’s own 'lil custom font, one might say. The heavily rational design was drawn by four scientists (including Jaugeon) in 1692 and based on a grid of 2,304 tiny squares per letter.

My teacher once told me that Romain Du Roi was the first “transitional” typeface. A bridge from the Old Style designs modelled on handwritten letters to typefaces created specifically for the printing press.

While the artists behind Romain Du Roi created a strictly geometric face, the punch cutters who produced it were still in the mindset of freestyling. They translated the sketches onto metal by eye and with rudimentary measuring, becoming the ones truly deserving of a crown.

It’s this tension between strict geometry and a loopy, hand-held interpretation (think of the King after an evening inspecting his distillery) that informed the lines of our own Gaisyr.

Together with our France-stemming intern Louis Brousseaud, Fabian spent some time stalking the archives of the Musee de L'Imprimerie Lyon and the Imprimerie National in Paris, sourcing documents and beginning to draw Gaisyr’s first digital shape.

In the year that followed, both Risto Kujanpää and Fabiola Mejía occasionally sketched on top of the interpretation, before Michelangelo Nigra grabbed the spatula and unearthed Gaisyr once and for all from our drawers. Over numerous years, he extended the typeface into the full family retail spectacle that it is today. Thank you Mike. Johannes, Maddy, Sascia, Mathias, and Tina then worked on the communication and campaign.