Industry: Luxury

Custom Typefaces for Louis Vuitton Magazine

Two custom typefaces built for one magazine

Production Type designed two custom typefaces for the Louis Vuitton consumer magazine, commissioned in 2014 with art direction by Yorgo Tloupas of Yorgo & Co. LV Clémence, by Jean-Baptiste Levée, is an extended slab serif for headline use on coated paper, expanded from a single style into Light and Extra Light weights with a distinctively open italic. LV Loys Sans Condensed is a single-weight condensed sans with three discrete uppercase heights, enabling flexible all-caps typesetting without optical scaling.

Set in LV Clémence, LV Loys Sans Condensed

Insights

LV Clémence is Jean-Baptiste Levée's interpretation of the Hellenic Wide lineage, a design traceable to at least 1876 that circulated under more than a dozen names across European and American foundries; ATF included it in their combined catalog from the 1920s, with the name 'Hellenic Wide' itself dating to around 1950.
The italic for LV Clémence was developed with limited historical precedent, using curved-up strokes and prominent ball terminals to distinguish it from the relative stiffness of the roman cuts.
LV Loys Sans Condensed multiplexes all three uppercase height variants so each glyph shares identical advance widths across styles, demanding careful kerning when heights are mixed within a single line.
The three-height uppercase system in LV Loys has historical roots in stationery typography, where foundries cast all-caps letters on a shared body height, sometimes centring rather than baseline-aligning them.