Industry: Design

Typeface Design for Bely

A debut typeface that won a TDC Award of Excellence in Type Design

Bely is Roxane Gataud's debut type family, published by TypeTogether in 2016. It pairs two text weights with matching italics and a French-style display weight, grounding the text in classical proportions while pushing expressive contrast into the display. Bely Text mixes large triangular serifs at stroke tops with thick bracketed rectangular serifs at stroke bottoms; Bely Display amplifies the same logic into extreme, angled stroke contrast intended for headlines and packaging.

Set in Bely

Insights

The display weight extends the text weights' own serif and contrast rules to a logical extreme rather than departing from them structurally.
Bely Text employs a deliberate mixed-serif strategy: large triangular serifs at stroke tops and thick bracketed rectangular serifs at stroke bottoms.
The family covers the Latin A Extended glyph set and includes small caps, tabular and proportional lining and oldstyle figures, ligatures, case-sensitive variants, and fractions.
Bely accumulated recognition across several years: Gerard Unger Scholarship (2014), SOTA Catalyst Award (2016), and TDC Award of Excellence in Type Design (2017).