My favorite typeface: Chalet 1980

Written by Veerle Pieters. 3 comments

Veerle Pieters

Veerle Pieters is a graphic/web designer based in Deinze, Belgium and has been blogging since 2003. Starting in ‘92 as a freelance graphic designer Veerle worked on print design before focussing more on webdesign and GUI (since ‘96). She runs Duoh! n.v. together with Geert Leyseele.

Veerle Pieters on the topic of typography, and why she chose Chalet for the design of her blog.

Chalet 1980, part of the Chalet col­lec­tion, is the type­face I used for the design of my blog. One of the rea­sons I chose this one is because I fell in love with its pure sim­ple shape — type­faces like Chalet that have no frills are my absolute favorite.

A display of the variations within the Chalet 1980 typeface.

It’s the improved mod­ern­iza­tion of the Avant Garde. Together with color and grid, typog­ra­phy is one of the major build­ing blocks in a design. This means that Chalet 1980 isn’t always the per­fect choice for any design. Each design has a visual com­mu­ni­ca­tion with which the type­face should go hand in hand. My blog’s design is an expres­sion of who I am, it reflects my per­son­al­ity and I believe this type­face makes it complete.

It has a lot of fem­i­nin­ity because of the round curves. With its style that leans towards min­i­mal­ism it gives any design a very con­tem­po­rary look, which is exactly what I wanted. The thin line of Chalet Paris 1980 made the design still look light, attract­ing atten­tion with­out dis­trac­tion. When prop­erly used, you get a ‘less is more’ effect, where the text becomes the design itself. Look­ing closer at the char­ac­ter set of the alpha­bet, my atten­tion is drawn to the beau­ti­ful curves of the ‘f’, ‘r’ ‚’t’ and ‘y’. Also the fact that the let­ters ‘t’ and ‘d’ have the same cap height as an ‘h’ or ‘l’. This breaks the tra­di­tional guide­lines of typog­ra­phy, but how I love when rules are bro­ken only to reach the ulti­mate per­fec­tion. The cre­ator did a splen­did job. To me it is the per­fect typeface.

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Comments on this article

  1. Written by Keith Bell on the 18th of January

    “The cre­ator did a splen­did job. To me it is the per­fect typeface.”

    Not to men­tion the fact that it must be the only type­face series designed by some­one who never actu­ally existed, M. René Albert Chalet!

    For any­one who hasn’t seen it: http://​www​.under​con​sid​er​a​tion​.com/​s​p​e​a​k​u​p​/​a​r​c​h​i​v​e​s​/​0​0​2​1​7​0​.​h​tml

  2. Written by Theo on the 23rd of January

    The low­er­case ‘t’ does not share a cap height with ‘d’, ‘h’ or ‘l’ .. if your exam­ple graphic is cor­rectly rep­re­sent­ing the face.

    Per­son­ally, I think delib­er­ately try­ing to be ‘retro’ does not make some­thing look con­tem­po­rary. I’ve seen very few instances where this has actu­ally worked. The exag­ger­ated hoops of the ‘f’ and ‘r’ are dis­con­cert­ing to my eye and inter­rupt the flow of text purely for the sake of assert­ing the face’s per­son­al­ity, which is some­thing I don’t like in a non-​​display face.

  3. Written by Guy Leech on the 23rd of January

    Theo: That’s the image Veerle sup­plied us for the type­face, so I assume it’s cor­rect; maybe she just over­looked the ‘t’ height.

    And per­son­ally, I would never use Chalet as any­thing but a dis­play type (with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of the New York branch). As you say, it has far too much flair for it to be com­fort­able read­ing in extended blocks of text.

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