Escaut – Interview with Carine de Wandeleer

Interviewer: Escaut is a modern-looking flowing handwriting font with a very relaxed appearance. Did you design it with any particular applications in mind?

Carine: No, I didn't really design Escaut for any specific purpose. Actually I don't think about what a font can be used for, because I believe that could limit me. I’m often inspired by what I see around me, on supermarket packaging, magazines, street signs, in the works of ancient calligraphers or contemporary artists, or simply in the writing of someone close to me. So no. I just wake up one day wanting to do this or that, and I do it. 

The fonts that I produce are not for me, they are for other designers to use in their work. They are the ones who will choose the appropriate font for their application, and will use it as they want. I try to design with a wide range of styles, and the designer who is looking for a calligraphic font will find in my work a lot of material to choose from.

I: Escaut has the characteristic changes of contrast that make it look like it was drawn with an ink pen. Did you draft the characters on paper with a physical pen, and if so, what type of pen did you use?

C: Besides being a graphic designer, I studied calligraphy and fine arts. When I started designing fonts I used to draw dozens of examples of each letter on paper. I used different papers, more or less absorbent, and different writing tools. I have thousands of pencils, brushes, and pens of different kinds in my drawers. I also looked on the internet for information about making tools that would help my calligraphy, with unusual objects, tree branches, straw, cans, wood, etc., or I invented them myself. I studied in depth what the stroke of each tool was like, how it reacted if I loaded it with more or less ink, on different papers or materials.

Today I no longer need to do that artisan process. I decide how I want the font and imagine what it will be like. Only if I can't figure it out that way, I help myself by going back to the process of crafts, tools, and paper, but it is very rare. In the case of Escaut I wanted it to be a script made with a marker with a lot of ink, which leaves a charge of ink when the hand stops moving.

I: You’ve designed nearly 100 script fonts for Eurotypo, covering a wide range of styles from classic to modern. What would you say is the key secret to designing a connected font that looks handwritten?

C: I think that for a calligraphic font to look real, you need to study calligraphy and observe a lot. The study of calligraphy and fine arts were very important to me; they helped me to soften my hand, because the writing has to flow.

Calligraphic writing has a fluid character, and for it to look good, it has to look real, so it is important to include ligatures in calligraphic fonts. I see a lot of calligraphic fonts with errors in the ligatures; the letters are not linked correctly, so the flow is lost. When you write by hand, you create ligatures automatically without thinking; for example, it is not the same to link an ‘s’ to a ‘t’ than to another ‘s’. When designing the letter ‘s’ it is impossible for a single design to be used to link it with all the letters, so it is necessary to add special ligatures. You can’t do all of them, but at least a good selection of the most used ones. 

Another very important consideration is to make sure that what you design is readable. My work is not that of a calligraphic artist, who makes a work more related to art where the aesthetic is ahead of the functional. As a graphic designer, my fonts are used for communication, so form and its function are closely linked. The creative-expressive cannot detract from the readable and comprehensible.

Originally published September 2021 by Identifont.