Stylogeny combining Emigre × Post-Binary Typography

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Style combination · Pairs well

Emigre × Post-Binary Typography

Both are type-led laboratories that publish their own magazine as a showcase for their fonts. In Zone Mixte (2022) êkhô studio chose BBB Baskervvol with Baskerville's erasure of Sarah Eaves in mind, the story Zuzana Licko honoured in Mrs Eaves (1996); set a Baskervvol text in an Emigre-style specimen spread to join the two foundry experiments.

From the research on Post-Binary Typography (Bye Bye Binary and Inclusive French Type)

Mix them and make something Emigre Post-Binary Typography

No!Emigre × Post-Binary Typography1984 · 2018
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Emigre, their arrangement from Emigre, the finish from Post-Binary Typography. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

01

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Emigre & Early Digital Type Post-Binary Typography (Bye Bye Binary and Inclusive French Type)

Type from Emigre
Colour from Post-Binary Typography
Form from Emigre
Composition from Emigre
Surface from Post-Binary Typography

02

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Emigre

No!

Workbench; Emigre used Oakland and Emperor

Text · Post-Binary Typography

A Franco-Belgian type practice that redesigns written French for gender inclusion inside the word. Instead of the point médian, which the Académie française and the French state call a barrier to reading, new glyphs fuse masculine and feminine endings and ligatures or 'symbiotic' strokes join letters, so inclusive and non-binary words read as one form. Led since 2018 by the collective Bye Bye Binary, it forks open-source families under open licences and its own usage conditions (the CUTE), encodes them in a Queer Unicode Initiative and spreads them through workshops, banners and magazines.

Jost; Post-Binary Typography used BBB Baskervvol (Bye Bye Binary, from 2018), a post-binary fork of ANRT's Baskervville and BBB Poppins TN (Eugénie Bidaut and Camille Circlude, 2022), after Jonny Pinhorn's Poppins

03

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Post-Binary Typography, with a counter-accent from Emigre. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Emigre & Early Digital Type Post-Binary Typography (Bye Bye Binary and Inclusive French Type)

  • #f6f3ee ground · 36%
  • #151515 ink · 14%
  • #d42a7f accent · 18%
  • #e03c31 accent · 14%
  • #ee5d63 accent · 10%
  • #2b59c3 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f6f3ee;
  --ink: #151515;
  --accent-1: #d42a7f;
  --accent-2: #e03c31;
  --accent-3: #ee5d63;
  --accent-4: #2b59c3;
  --font-display: "Workbench", monospace;
  --font-text: "Jost", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Post-Binary Typography (Bye Bye Binary and Inclusive French Type): This is the living practice of a queer, trans and non-binary community and of named designers, most of them active: do not use the glyphs as decorative 'Pride' texture or for brand campaigns that ignore the people they were made for; follow the CUTE that comes with the fonts: credit and link the designers, keep the files complete, give on its sliding scale (€300 to €1,000 for a cultural institution) and respect its answer to companies that want an inclusive image to pinkwash: 'Look elsewhere'; and never attribute a generated poster or font to the collective or prompt an image model with its members' names. Image models invent fake ligatures and misspell French, so set real inclusive words in the actual fonts and have them checked by people who use them. Type the median-dot forms and let the OpenType features display the glyphs, rather than pasting QUNI's Private Use Area characters, which screen readers cannot voice meaningfully and which turn into blanks or wrong signs when copied or shown in another font. In France, inclusive writing with the point médian is proscribed in schools by circular (2021) and a Senate bill sought to ban it more widely (2023), so check before setting official French public documents this way.

04

The two styles

Oversized, distorted letters spell “DATA NOiSE” in black, red and blue on an off-white background. Pixelated edges, dotted textures, scattered squares and intersecting rules surround and interrupt the lettering. 1984–1998 · North America Emigre & Early Digital Type Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko's magazine and type foundry, launched in 1984 alongside the first Macintosh, turned the computer's low-resolution constraints into a new typographic idiom. Licko's bitmap and modular faces, VanderLans's shifting, layered layouts and the magazine's showcase of Cranbrook and CalArts work made Emigre the laboratory and mouthpiece of digital postmodern typography. Oversized, overlapping lowercase serif letters fill two rows on an ivory background, with a circumflex above the upper row. Black, magenta, lavender, coral and yellow shapes blend through speckled gradients, accented by thin lines, rectangles and circles. 2018–present · Western Europe, Central Europe Post-Binary Typography (Bye Bye Binary and Inclusive French Type) A Franco-Belgian type practice that redesigns written French for gender inclusion inside the word. Instead of the point médian, which the Académie française and the French state call a barrier to reading, new glyphs fuse masculine and feminine endings and ligatures or 'symbiotic' strokes join letters, so inclusive and non-binary words read as one form. Led since 2018 by the collective Bye Bye Binary, it forks open-source families under open licences and its own usage conditions (the CUTE), encodes them in a Queer Unicode Initiative and spreads them through workshops, banners and magazines.

05

More combinations

With Emigre

With Post-Binary Typography

Every style combination