Industry: Design

Typeface Design for Minotaur

Cubism translated into a usable type system

Minotaur is a sans and serif type family originally designed for a Paris art museum, taking Cubism as its conceptual starting point. Rather than fragmenting letterforms into abstraction, the design draws on historical sources—Venus Grotesque, Bruce's Scotch Roman, and A. V. Hershey's early vector-computing series—to build a family composed entirely of straight lines. A fixed set of widths, inherited from historical technical constraints, adds a further structural discipline without sacrificing legibility at any size.

Set in Minotaur

Insights

The family restricts letterform outlines to straight lines while drawing inspiration from the Cubist movement, keeping the design functional rather than purely abstract.
Three historical references anchor the family as a whole: Venus Grotesque, Bruce's Scotch Roman, and Hershey's early vector-computing series.
Width variations are derived from historical technical limitations rather than conventional optical spacing decisions.
Minotaur Serif offsets its angular contours by preserving the underlying skeleton of its early-20th-century model, creating tension between harshness and elegance.