Bricolage Grotesque

Bricolage is French for putting something together out of whatever is lying around, and Mathieu Triay meant the name literally. His sans is a collage of historical sources, technical choices and personal feeling, and it began as a fork of somebody else’s font, Mayenne Sans, a single weight open source design by Jérémy Landes of Studio Triple.

From there Triay pulled it in 2 directions. The compressed weights went toward Grotesque Nº9, a British face with an anxious, wonky streak; the regular widths toward Antique Olive, the French sans with an easy, confident manner. At small optical sizes the design calms down into something more neutral and contemporary, with deep ink traps cut into the joins.

Why British and French at once? Triay has described the font as an attempt to show what it feels like to move country and start again, to carry a hybrid identity where you can no longer be what you were and can never fully become someone else. Few type designers explain a grotesque that way. It shows in the letters, which never settle into 1 mood.

This page carries the normal width, 7 weights from Extra Light to Extra Bold, with Vietnamese. Its figures are well stocked, old style and lining, tabular and proportional. We like the heavy weights on posters; for text, Regular with old style figures switched on and a line height around 1.5.