The font foundry, P22 was the brainchild of Richard Kegler, concentrating on the production of typefaces influenced by history, art and occasionally science. Richard Kegler himself was trained in the arts and wrote his Master’s thesis on the renowned 20trh century artist Marcel Duchamp.
The Cézanne typeface designed by Kegler & Want uses actual handwriting samples from Paul Cézanne which were taken apart and reconstructed digitally with individual letters being separated from the words they were sampled from. The leaders and tails were adjusted so that all letters would connect at the same point so there are no extraneous strokes or unconnected letters unless Cézanne’s handwriting had them too. This is apparent with the lower case “w” and “d” which have swashes on the last stroke curving away from the next letter. The Cézanne typeface surprisingly does not look too contrived as can be a problem with handwriting and scripted fonts.
The result is a usable script typeface that accurately depicts Cézanne’s slightly shaky handwriting style but there are other reasons for the less than regular shapes in the Cézanne typeface. Cézanne lived in an era when written material was created using a quill and a pot of ink. Consequently, his handwriting contains irregularities that are common with quill–written text. Some of the curves have an irregular stroke such as the ascender on the lower case “d” the descending stroke on the lower case “p” and the upper case “T” which also uses an old style format.
After releasing the initial Cézanne Regular character set, P22 continued work on this intriguing font family by adding Cézanne alternate character sets, Swashes and ligatures. They also added a character set that consist of 72 Cézanne drawings and sketches. The sketches include some self-portraits and skulls interspersed with a range of other line-drawn sketches.
