Inès Davodeau’s typography practice expertly revives fonts from over 100 years ago

Being an only child, Inés shares that a lot of the time she had to fill her own time – inventing games, objects and stories. These are all the things, alongside her love of drawing and creating, that fuelled Inés’ creativity. When it came to deciding upon a degree to study, Inés planned to take engineering as a means of expressing her simultaneously creative and logical mind. But, going to a student fair to explore engineering, Inés instead came across the graphic design stall. “Eventually, I left with only design school brochures,” she tells It’s Nice That. When studying design, Inés initially found herself attracted to editorial design and layout, before becoming more interested in type design during her third year at school. So much so that she decided to take part in an introductory typography class and a workshop, during which Inés was asked to design a display font. It wasn’t long until Inés was designing her first type, Asfen. “It was my first type experience and I loved it,” she reminisces.

Recently, Inés completed a project for the New York-based art director Ceclia Azcarate, creating a custom typeface for her design identity, with artistic direction led by Auroe Chauve. Leading with the idea of creating a font inspired by the pre-romantic Greco-Roman era and fresco’s and engravings from that time period, the goal was to build an imperfect or even “bizarre” font. “What we were looking for were those imperfections that appear because of the engraving process and the test of time and translate it into a digital drawing,” Inés explains. The process lasted three months and, among the inspirations that Auroe gave to Inés, she was given a set of engravings with letters of a smaller and taller height to refer to. This pushed Inés to create a glyph set where each vowel and a few other letters have three different versions, resulting in the appearance of “dancing” – allowing you to “play” with the composition. Fun, stylish and oozing with mythical and biblical imagery, the Cecila font is yet another indication of Inés’ brilliant ability to reinvigorate, reimagine and give life to the fonts and letterings of history.