Curves plot planetary orbits and ligatures trace shooting stars in Gwennina Moigne’s astrological typeface

The concept for the Paris-based graphic designer and art director Gwennina Moigne’s latest typeface Solæ first formed during a typographic revival brief on her master’s course back in 2018. The project was a typographic exercise strictly based on a page out of a 1904 book, Imprimerie Nationale, pushing the designers to reimagine the historical text as fertile ground to create something contemporary.

This challenge was one that Gwennina was never quite sure she was finished with, which is why she decided to come back to it two years after graduating in 2020, during the wake of the first set of national Covid lockdowns. Revisiting the project, the designer aimed to push her previous experiments into a fully functioning letterset: “Over several years, I experimented with different versions, exploring how far I could move away from the original model while keeping its spirit. I wanted to reinterpret it through a more personal, expressive lens,” she says.

All of that kerning, tracking and tweaking led to Solæ, a typeface that makes reference to Louis XIV, the Sun King, with letterforms that are inspired by cosmic themes: “stars, constellations and celestial forms”, Gwennina says. The typeface’s forms reflect these astrological ideas – “curves suggest planetary movements, ligatures recall shooting-star trails, and the fine contrasts evoke constellations”. Gwennina also developed a Rotalic style (rotated italic) of Solæ, an alternative take on the traditional italic versions of typefaces that evoked the paths of celestial orbits.

As a long-running type design project, Gwennina had the luxury of redrawing each letterform in her source typeface by hand, all to understand its inner workings. “The original Romain du Roi followed a precise grid, but I wanted to free it from that rigidity, to make it more fluid and visually balanced for modern contexts,” she explains.

In the process of extrapolating from these original proportions and terminals to find the unique rhythm that would shape Solæ, Gwennina found herself fixated on one thing: glyphs. “For me, the extensive work on ligatures (a ligature exists for every combination of capital letters) is truly a defining feature of this alphabet,” she shares. “The final family covers around 100 languages and includes 2,082 glyphs: a wide range of ligatures, alternates, inclusive-writing glyphs, astrological symbols and lunar phases.” In amongst thousands of detailed design choices the designer made, Gwenina found that the hardest part of the solo project was “keeping consistency and confidence throughout such a long process”.

Like many of our personal projects Solæ happened alongside freelance projects and other commitments, so progress was slow, sometimes with months between sessions. “Each time I reopened the file,” Gwennina shares, “I questioned past choices, which forced me to trust my earlier decisions and accept the design’s evolution over time.” Once Solæ had found its final form Gwennina then partnered with Blaze type to bring the font out of her desktop files and into the world with a poster series that celebrated the end of “one very long project”, she says.

For the occasion, Gwennina invited 12 designers and studios whose work she admires, giving each a “carte blanche” to create a poster using Solæ and a zodiac sign of their choice. The list of collaborators includes Fakepaper, Élise Rigollet, Clémence Gouy, Eschenlauer Sinic, Odds Studio, Choque Le Goff, Pierre Vanni, République Studio, Task Office, Aletheia, Marine Buffard and Maison Solide. The results are nothing short of stunning — an explosion of colour and form that puts the attention to detail in the design of Solæ under a new microscope. Each contributor moulded the typeface into their own unique visual language, and flexed its versatility. “It was moving to see something you created become a tool for others’ creativity,” Gwennina tells us.

The project’s finale was a launch event in Paris which brought together all the posters into one exhibition this September. “It was a true celebration, gathering a lot of people from the design community. As designers, we don’t often have the opportunity to properly release projects and show them to people. Moments like that are really important,” the designer ends.