Mont Saint-Michel

Letters shaped into a skyline

Blaze Type developed a custom typeface family for the Établissement Public National du Mont Saint-Michel, a public body created in 2019 to unify the site's fragmented identity. Graphéine designed the logotype—letterforms of the name arranged to silhouette the rocky island—then commissioned Blaze Type to expand those extracted glyphs into a full typographic system. The design draws on two historical scripts found in the site's archives: Carolingian minuscule and Blackletter, blended with a contemporary sans-serif structure.

Set in Mont Saint-Michel

Insights

Lowercase glyphs were extracted directly from the logotype and refined—curves redrawn, optical corrections made, spacing balanced—before the full character set was built outward from that nucleus.
Capitals take cues from interwar French sans-serifs (Peignot, Chambord) but appear narrower, with vertical serifs added selectively to the middle bars of E and F, the diagonal of K, and the ends of S, introducing rhythmic breaks echoing those in the lowercase.
The family was extended across five weights via interpolation (Thin to Bold), with Thin resolving toward an early-1900s grotesque and Bold toward a sans-serif Normande.
Rather than adding condensed widths, Blaze Type implemented a variable OpenType axis that stretches glyphs vertically across three predefined height proportions (Low, Middle, High)—spanning two to three x-heights—without altering optical weight.