Gaulois

A couple of years before the second World War, Marcel Jacno, the popular French graphic designer who in the 1930s designed iconic posters for Gaumont and Paramount and famously illustrated the Gaulish helmet that first adorned the Gauloises cigarette packs in 1936, was asked by Deberny & Peignot to design a calligraphic typeface for the advertising market. Jacno’s Scribe design, billed by D&P as a “virile ad writing” typeface, was released to some great fanfare in 1937, enjoyed some time of French spotlight, and was ready to make waves in the rest of Europe before the war broke out and snuffed its chances at international recognition. However, samples of it can still be found in some specialty post-war publications as an example of a trend that lasted a couple of decades, when Western European type manufacturers commissioned famous visual artists to design typefaces in order to capitalize on the artists’ fame - the trend that brought us standards like Futura and the long list of Lucien Bernhard and Imre Reiner faces.

This exclusive digital version of Jacno’s design expands on the original concept with a large character set that includes plenty of alternates, a couple of different ways for seamless lowercase connections, three sets of figures, and extended Latin language support, adding up to over 540 characters in a one big, contextually-programmed font.