Malou Verlomme

Malou Verlomme (1982) studied applied arts at Duperré and then took a Masters in Typeface Design at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom in 2005. Since 2006, he has been working as a freelance typeface designer for Hoefler & Frere-Jones, the Oxford University Press, Fontsmith and the Chévara studio.

What did you learn in Reading and how did you develop your Ficus typeface?
The teaching system at Reading leaves you plenty of freedom and independence. You are made responsible to face the scope of the task you have to accomplish during the year and you feel under pressure as a result, but the framework is very versatile. The teaching is not very academic, you do not necessarily have to do calligraphy, for example, but we were given the means for developing our own research by benefitting from some high quality speakers, from study trips or from having access to some of the remarkable archive collections that are held there. Nevertheless, we were expected to turn out some theoretical essays, which helps you familiarise with the history of typography. It was in that context that I created Ficus, a typeface destined for small blocks of text, while remaining organic and expressive.

You design your own typefaces, yet your work also includes redesigning: how do you approach each of these creations?
Whenever you have to put your hand to a typeface designed by someone else, you have to get inside his skin and understand the spirit in which he created it. To a certain extent, you have to forget yourself. I have also reworked Greek and Cyrillic typefaces without even speaking the languages, but relying on letting the spirit of the design flow through me. In order to design an original typeface, as I just did recently for the landscape architect Camille Muller, you have to plunge into that person’s world and philosophy, so as to rewrite them in the form of typography. The exchange we had as a result was very important for the ultimate product. In another field, I have done some grids for the page layouts for the dictionaries published by the Oxford University Press: in that case, it was a question of adapting the use of the typeface to numerous levels of interpretation and understanding.

www.malouverlomme.com