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Jean-Baptiste Levée took a Higher diploma in applied arts (DSAA) in typographic creation at the Estienne school in 2004. Meeting up with Alessio Leonardi, Christophe Badani, Jean François Porchez, Xavier Dupré and Olivier Nineuil, he started working with them, before setting up as a freelance and establishing his own office, Opto, in 2006.
He works for foundries, typeface designers, art directors, design offices and private companies, as well as creating his own typefaces.

Your work focuses on typefaces. Nevertheless, it can also take other forms. What forms would they be?
As far as pure creation is concerned, the very first thing is lettering, which corresponds to designing a letter or a group of letters. It all comes under the heading of the search for a harmony that helps make the result unique. I recently worked on modernising the Christian Dior Couture logo.
Then there's creating typefaces. In that case, you have to create everything. For example, Christophe Badani asked me to work with him on designing an identity alphabet for the Pimkie ready-to-wear brand. They already had a logo: we used it as the starting point for developing a whole family of lettering.
I am also in the process of creating a typeface and numerous families for it, Panorama. I started doing the research for this in 2004. It's a long-term effort, you have to learn that patience is a virtue!

Do you ever find yourself working on existing typefaces?
Absolutely, yes. It's what you call the development of a font. You start from an existing font: to serve a clear objective of style and readability, I worked alongside Jean François Porchez on creating Henderson for an international consultancy group. In actual fact, it was a rehabilitation of Baskerville, which dates to the middle of the eighteenth century. Numerous digital versions had appeared since then, but they did not look to us to comply very much with the spirit of the period version. So we rolled up our sleeves and started again from scratch, designing a more contemporary typeface.

You also design publications and works: in these cases, how do you choose the typefaces you use?
When you design typefaces yourself, you appreciate above all the harmony and subtlety of the ones you use. I use Costa PTF, created in 1999 by Jean François Porchez, and Arno Pro, created in 2006 by Robert Slimbach, for the catalogue of a book-lovers' collection. For me, it is very satisfying setting little capitals, links, ornaments and mathematical signs…I put all the typographic refinements I can into it! So it is a very good exercise to work for such a discerning public, making a catalogue that contains some beautiful works aided by very complete typefaces. It's a little like a test case.

www.opto.fr