Colard Mansion font family
The Colard Mansion: a new font family as tribute
This custom font family was designed in the light of ‘Haute Lecture by Colard Mansion: innovation text and image in medieval Bruges’, a unique exhibition on the oeuvre of Colard Mansion, at the Groeningemuseum Bruges which ran from March 1th until June, 3rd 2018.
The remarkable typography of Mansion inspired type designer Jo De Baerdemaeker to carry out detailed research into the work of the master and to develop a new digital font family for the City of Bruges. It consists of Colard Mansion Bastarda, and an angular sans typeface family which is based on the skeleton of Mansion’s calligraphic letterforms of his Rotunda printing type. The Colard Mansion font family was officially launched on 7 December 2017.
The font family was exclusively used throughout the exhibition, its catalogue entitled ‘Colard Mansion. Incunabula, Prints and Manuscripts in Medieval Bruges’ (designed by Cedric Verhelst for Snoeck Publishers), and the communication of the City of Bruges.
For the scenography of the exhibition, Jo also conceptualized and designed the typographic layouts of the exhibition walls, in a joyful collaboration with Koen Bovée. The project was a participation between the Municipal Library in Bruges (Openbare Bibliotheek Brugge) and European Lettering Institute.
At present, Mansion’s Rotunda typeface is being revived as a contemporary digital font to serve as a companion to Colard Mansion Bastarda, and will be released later this year, so keep your eyes open for regular updates on its development. ◊
Font in use
