PS Fournier, created by Stéphane Elbaz, is designed in tribute to Pierre Simon Fournier. Fournier was the prolific Parisian type designer whose work is best known for its iconic representation of French transitional style. PS Fournier successfully elegantly represents the transition to the modern era of typography. Featuring three optical sizes, PS Fournier is designed to perform in any context.
The Pierre Simon Fournier heritage
Pierre Simon Fournier was a leading innovative type designer of the mid-18th century. Early in his career, the young Pierre Simon developed a strong aesthetic that he cultivated throughout his life. His art is representative of the pre-revolutionary ‘Age of Enlightenment’ (Siècle des Lumières). Precursor of the Modern style, Fournier’s body of work deeply influenced his times, and created the fertile ground from which the Didot family and Giambattista Bodoni developed their own styles.
During the historical period of 18th century, Fournier exemplified the intellectual pursuits of the times with his own research of type, documenting in detail the typefounding process. Fournier studied type history and documented in detail the typefounding process, and He also offered a unique vision: he is the first to clearly comprehend the concept of “type family,” sorting a set of similarly styled alphabets by sizes, width, and by x-heights. In addition, Fournier is one of the earliest advocates of the point system to organize the practice of typography, the point system that contemporary typographers continue to use to this day.
The refined and discreet elegance of PS Fournier
The 42 styles of the PS Fournier family include romans and italics, with weights ranging from Light to Black, and 3 optical sizes to accommodate a large diversity of uses. With a close look at the family, one finds you’ll find that the difference between the optical sizes (Petit, standard and Grand) is more than a contrast variation between the thin and the thick, but declines a palette of distinct tones: More streamlined and robust in the smaller sizes (Petit), more refined and detailed in the larger sizes (Grand).
The PS Fournier standard family is designed to adapt to any situation with its intermediate optical size, from body copy to headlines. With a bit of tracking, PS Fournier Petit will make the smallest captions perfectly readable. However, Petit family is not limited to body and captions — its “slabby robustness” will make a relevant headline choice as well.
PS Fournier Grand presents a higher contrast adapted to large text sizes, displays or banners. Its refined elegance makes it a perfect choice for Design, Fashion or Luxury publications. As a “modern” type PS Fournier Grand features a larger x-height than the preexistent old style typefaces such as Garamond or Jenson. These proportions provide any basic text set in PS Fournier Grand a strong typographic texture.
As a result, the PS Fournier global family is a versatile alternative to the Modern typefaces commonly used in the publishing industry. The optical sizes, the large range of weights, and the design variations make this family adaptable to captions, paragraphs, and pages, as well as to large texts and displays.
A leading-edge typography in the 18th century
In the spirit of modernity, Pierre Simon Fournier (1712—1768) did not find any use for the conventional swashes still produced by peers such as Caslon or Baskerville. Nevertheless the French designer created many inventive elements to decorate the page and set delightful variations in the text itself. To this regard PS Fournier includes a large set of glyphs variations, ligatures and more than one hundred glyphs for borders, rules and ornaments or — as called in French — “vignettes.”
PS Fournier, refined & understated elegance in 42 styles
PS Fournier designed by Stéphane Elbaz is exclusively available at Typofonderie, this new typeface family include romans and italics in 42 styles, 3 optical sizes ranging from light to black to accommodate diverse uses. Over the years, the team that worked on the PS Fournier designed by Stéphane Elbaz has included Benjamin Blaess, Mathieu Réguer and Jean François Porchez. Our intern, Julie Patat helped a lot for the launch of the typeface in the past two months. PS Fournier include more than 800 glyphs by font, extended languages support, 4 sets of figures, capitals, small caps, lowercases, superiors, ligatures, alternates, swashes, titling variants, stylistic sets, contextual alternates and ornaments.
PS Fournier: Availability of the new typeface family
The new PS Fournier OpenType fonts are available in our exclusive PRO version. Download the PS Fournier specimen in pdf format for full details of these Advanced typography functions.
PS Fournier in use
As a tradition, at Typofonderie, we test a new typeface family on various applications, using existing designs. Its the final part of any project and its great fun for us. See our Fonts in use section for more.
