Typeface Design for Shoah Memorial’s Wall of Names

A typeface built to survive sandblasting in stone

Production Type designed Memorial, a custom variable typeface for the renovated Wall of Names at Paris' Shoah Memorial, which records 75,568 Jewish deportees from France. The original inscriptions, set in Frutiger 57 Condensed, had accumulated typographical errors and suffered visually from sandblasting on porous Jerusalem limestone. Memorial was engineered to compensate for the stone-cutting process and to activate automatic shaping features when paired with a names-and-dates database covering roughly 80,000 names.

Set in Memorial

Insights

Ink traps and light traps were added specifically to offset rounding and angle clogging caused by sandblasting on non-homogenous limestone.
The typeface includes both variable and fixed numeral widths toggled by position in a line, plus two optical sizes and dynamically aligned bullets and separators.
Width variation of ±7.5% at constant weight was specified alongside a 25% total span; the prior setting had applied mechanical condensation of 90–105% to Frutiger 57 Condensed.
Memorial was designed to activate automatic shaping features when coupled with the names-and-dates database.