Industry: Design

Negatif

Gothic letterforms carved from black paper

Negatif is a blackletter display typeface by Nicolas Dupuis that began with calligraphic research before letters were physically cut from black paper, pursuing raw, incisive forms while retaining gothic inspiration. The design is conceived as carving into matter rather than drawing. A defining characteristic is its deliberately tight spacing, developed in Glyphs so that letterforms touch and merge into a dense, solid block of text suited to large-scale compositions.

Set in Negatif

Insights

The design process moved from calligraphic sketching to physical paper-cutting, aiming for raw, incisive, cutting forms.
Letter spacing was treated as a compositional variable: characters were reworked in Glyphs until they touch, producing a unified textural block rather than discrete glyphs.
The typeface is sized for large-scale display use, with weight and density intended to support overlay and texture-based compositions.