Plaak

French street signs hiding multiple typefaces at once

Plaak draws from the hand-traced lettering found on French enamelled street nameplates, a vernacular tradition designer Damien Gautier observed to contain multiple coexisting alphabets rather than a single unified style. Rather than homogenising these forms, Gautier preserved their inherent diversity across 24 styles organised into six width series—from very narrow (Sathonay) to extra-wide (Ney). Each series retains independently designed details in specific characters, and the family includes capitals and small capitals, reflecting the near-absence of lowercase on French street signs.

Set in Plaak

Insights

Each of the six width series retains independently designed details in certain characters such as G, K, M, Q, and R, rather than sharing a single unified set of forms.
Lowercase characters were largely absent from the source material, so the family prioritises capitals and small capitals.
Activating the Ligatures OpenType feature surfaces a set of ligatures that reference the street-sign origin.
The organisational logic of width series was consciously modelled on Adrian Frutiger's system for Univers.