Type Design Case Study
Polina Pasechnaia
01 / The challenge
How can expressive hand-drawn lettering become a coherent digital system?
Art Nouveau - “New Art” - developed rapidly at the end of the nineteenth century and reached its height in the early twentieth century. It spanned architecture, furniture, illustration, and typography, connected by intricate flowing lines, organic forms, and a desire to unite art with everyday life. Typography played an essential role: letterforms did not simply carry information, but communicated the rhythm, elegance and expressive character of the period.
Art Nouveau typefaces emerged from a search for a distinctive visual language. Artists moved away from the constraints of traditional type and explored ornamental, hand-drawn forms as a means of expression. The line became an independent visual element, allowing lettering, image and composition to operate as one system rather than as separate layers.
Jules Chéret was pivotal to the formation of modern poster art. His lithographic process made richer colour and more complex compositions possible and influenced a generation of artists, including Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Without the facilities of Chéret’s studio, Lautrec combined drawing, watercolour, sketches, and lithography to create an immediate visual language in which typography became part of the poster's action.
This project examines what was structurally innovative in that lettering and asks how its expressive qualities can be translated into a contemporary typeface. The intention was not to imitate an Art Nouveau appearance, but to identify repeatable principles within irregular historical forms and use them to build a functional digital system. Using the letter A as a graphic map. Variations of one grapheme were compared through module, axis, geometry, contour and mass. Differences in stroke width, crossbar, counter and proportion revealed a visual vocabulary that could be repeated across a complete alphabet.
Individual letterforms were documented through description, contour and colour before being translated into construction principles.
Geometrising the form into a modular system.
Observation became reconstruction. Supporting strokes, crossbars, counters and terminals were treated as interconnected components. This exposed a shared soft geometry and turned the letter A into a matrix for the wider type system.
The letters were redrawn manually in Illustrator using a custom grid and consistent construction logic.
The completed letterforms were transferred into Fontself for character assignment, spacing and initial testing
The final system includes Regular and Outline
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Posted Sep 9, 2026
Original Art Nouveau display typeface, developed through historical research, lettering analysis and a modular digital system for a complete alphabet.
