I learned recently that “Usine” means factory. The old Jack Usine Smeltery logotype depicted a factory. Is Usine your name, or is it an artist name?

Usine is a pseudonym. I come from Lorraine, the land of dead factories. I have two grandparents who worked in steel factories, and I worked for a month in a huge electrogalvanizing plant during the summer just before I started my art studies, which served as an inspiration for the name.

Jack Usine’s Audimat (2015) in the third iteration. The typeface was initially released in 2003. The design was reviewed by Frank Grießhammer for Typographica.

My first meeting with your work was Audimat – a free font that was very different from the other free fonts. It was of high quality, but also somehow off-kilter, resisting the clean kind of Modernist design I was used to seeing. Was this resistance something you were already conscious of back then?

I was not aware of that at the time. In fact, I trained myself in type design. I tried to turn my weaknesses into some kind of quality. I approached poorly made lettering because I myself couldn’t achieve that perfection. I think it comes down to being a self-taught type designer. I tried to draw Audimat in a clean Modern style, but the result came out a little different due to my technical weaknesses.

You write that your type is “nonconformist” and “deliberately irregular and whimsical in order to fight against the ambient glumness of this world”. What do you mean by this?

It’s always difficult to define your own work. Barry Deck was saying about his Template Gothic typeface: “a type that reflects more truly the imperfect language of an imperfect world, inhabited by imperfect beings”. I have always loved this quote and included it in my graduation thesis. I really like this notion of imperfection. Not to sell the most beautiful, the most readable, the greatest typography of all time. I think there are way too many people doing this, and I don’t want to be a part of this game. I keep the freedom to indulge myself, to take the time to do things that may seem irrelevant to the community.

There seems to be so much joy in your work, and I think this is part of what draws me to it. Can you talk a little about Bon Pour 1 Tour, your new studio together with Fanny?

I met my wife Fanny at the Fine Art School of Bordeaux, and we started our collaboration immediately. We have been collaborating since 2000. Working collectively, and also having fun while working, has always been a desire for us. Life is sad, and if we don’t collaborate with people we like, and do things we enjoy, work stops being interesting. Having fun is an important part of our work.

At the end of our studies we founded our own studio which was called GUsto (taste). I have family in Colombia, and Fanny has Spanish origins so having a Spanish term was fitting. GUsto is an acronym of our surnames – Garcia Usine STudiO.

We thought ourselves graphic designers when we graduated, and for a time we liked being graphic designers and all that. A few years down the line, however, it became clear that we were not really graphic designers. Graphic design was not necessarily a job that we liked – especially the commercial side of it, working for companies that did not share our values. So, Bon Pour 1 Tour is the continuation of GUsto, but in an even more joyful way – more focused on our local area where we live, in the countryside. It is about doing things a little more discreetly.

Does your location matter for your way of working?

We live in Castillon-la-Bataille, a small village with only 3000 inhabitants. It is a rural environment. Culturally, it remains a fairly complicated area. Our design work is received in a slightly bizarre way, and not quite understood. All of our jokes don’t get through to the audience, but that’s what’s interesting and challenging.

From the start, our work has been about where we live. Much of our work is devoted to research, through photography and our interest in local history. Living in a somewhat neglected place like ours has certainly changed our practices, with the common desire to take care of it and enhance it. What we are trying to do with our editions for example.

This aspect of your design, this shift from fonts to lettering, and the freedom and joy that is so evident in your work is something I’m extremely interested in. In my work as a type designer I continue to search for a way to work and still feel like I contribute positively to the world. Often, the role of the graphic designer seems to be more about dictating from above, than serving from below.

I’m happily surprised to see how you seem to understand my approach and my work.

I draw letters to play with language. It is the two of them together that interest me, and the poetry that language can produce. Our ultimate goal is to play with language, and to use humor. The magic of language interests me as much as the drawing itself, so the design of the letters is more of a pretext to play with language.

I think it is very hard to talk about my work. I’ve found that I express myself better with few words in puns, in meaning, and in very short sentences that are visual. In fact my language is like that. I’d rather develop my thinking in this kind of way, in mini sketches or mini … I don’t know... how can I say it? Miniature typographic compositions. That’s the most suitable way for me to express myself to the world. It’s what makes me happy. It is my therapy.

Jack Usine at work on a shop front window.

Europe – and by proxy France – has a long history of Imperialistic type design. I am thinking of the Romain du Roi in France, but also the Art Deco lettering under Mussolini, and going back to the Capitalis Monumentalis: the Imperial letter. Even the Modernist Neo Grotesk has this ideal at its core: flattening all cultural expression into one: that of the white, civilized man.

I never really got into this question of universal typeface, because I’m totally interested by the opposite. What attracted me to type design from the start is precisely the local particularities, and the crossbreeding. The mix of styles, the mix of eras, the mix of cultures. This is precisely what I like to find in vernacular handcrafted inscriptions, for example.

I think that yes, a designer can give a direction, intentions (bad or good) to his creation, and it is moreover for this reason that I have always presented my creations through a well-defined universe, not neutral at all.

But since the typeface is a tool, it will often be the user who will have the last word. We often see that a successful use of a typeface will produce children, and that it is this use that will be the benchmark for future uses of that same typeface. The first intentions of the creation are then out of the game. The consumer society is strong enough to take over forms of protest with the aim of selling objects to the masses, without any scruples. We could also now compose anarchist leaflets in Romain du Roi just to piss off the royalists, right?

You maintain the Herbarium (Jules Vernacular) where you collect photos of letters. Are you familiar with Walter Benjamin’s writing on history? He argues that history is always written by the victors, and that the true history of the oppressed is found in the ruins and the fragments.

Yes! This expresses my own thoughts very well. Jules Vernacular draws from my interest in badly done signs, in the sign painter’s failed lettering. There is something incongruous found in writing in public spaces. The micro detail of the flaws is what inspires me the most.

For me, it is about making qualities of your mistakes, to take an error in one letterform and explore how that error works in the context of a type family or just a word – to put them on another level, another scale. Suddenly they are no longer errors, but rather visual poetry.

To “succeed” as a type designer means for some big famous company to use my typefaces (most of the time for something I don’t like), or for a “great artist” to make his mark in history. I am asking myself if there could be some other measure of success. Lately I have been thinking that to learn, and to always continue learning, might be one possible path. Your work of late has shifted away from type design into lettering. Lettering is perhaps harder to appropriate for commercial purposes?

This is a question that I’ve been seriously asking myself for the past few years. Like you, I wonder a lot about distributing typefaces in this crazy world, with graphic design being the favorite tool of capitalism. And that’s probably why I find it hard to finish my current type projects. I don’t want to think about diffusion.

I started with graffiti when I was young, and the sensation of writing at the human scale – on the wall, outside – is something I always loved to do. I try to reclaim that with my lettering work. The spontaneous way of working, of being able to improvise is something I couldn’t find in type design. Designing typefaces takes me months, maybe even years. It is a long process, and I am very meticulous about it. My lettering work allows me to escape from this state. In that sense, it is the perfect complement to type design. Lettering allows me to create words and phrases faster, while capturing a certain rawness. I need the two. It is a back and forth between them.

Type design has always been very traditional. The system comes from hundreds of years of writing with the broad nib pen, and its traces are what creates the harmony in a text. In lettering, you don’t have this limitation. I was wondering if there is something you have learned from lettering that you can then apply back to type design? Some new way of making a harmonious system that is not the traditional one? These are big questions, so I don’t know if its possible to answer.

I don’t know. I think, in a way, the two of them feed into each other. And if your question is “does my knowledge of type help me when I do lettering work”, then yes – and the opposite is also true.

I see you as an outsider in the world of fonts. Maybe it’s the language barrier? But there also seems to be something different about your work. The way I see it, you are not trying to be the same kind of hero that the other type designers try to be. Is there some truth to that? It seems to be more about your own joy, than about making a name for yourself.

I don’t work for the money, I don’t direct my designs according to commercial considerations. I try to have fun working for myself. I’m a bit borderline when it comes to type design, but it’s the same with my graphic design and my art. In fact, I would say in each medium I am a little “out there”. Fanny as well. That is to say, that we are at the borders of these disciplines.

It is not something we are doing on purpose, but there are certainly things that interest me less in the world of typography. There is a lot of ego, and I notice a lot of people that want to live on in history. It creates characters that are a bit … It interests me less, so I maintain some distance to that culture.

The last question I wanted to ask is: Do you see some way of bringing this kind of mindset back into being a type designer. Is there some way you can work as a type designer and make it meaningful? Not about being a hero. Not about making a lot of money, but making a meaningful contribution to society.

Well actually, it’s just about choosing the people you work with. Or at least choosing the people whom you don’t want to work with. That’s what I think.

If you’ll permit one more: Is this also part of why you decided to live in a small village?

We left Bordeaux, a city that is growing, growing, growing. Coming here allowed us to purchase a very cheap house. Castillon-la-Bataille is one of the poorest cities in the region, and the standard of living means that we are much less dependent on income. We live very simple. Of course, we still need to make a little, but this move gave us the opportunity to collaborate with humble clients. We have developed a whole method to work cheaply, because people here do not have the “big city” budgets to employ designers. We have adapted, so that a logotype can from time-to-time be produced on a €200 budget, but that also means that we only give ourselves one day to complete it.

This is the reality of living in a place like Castillon-la-Bataille. There are no cinemas, no warms bars or cafes where we would like to spend time, so we spend less money. There are no stores to buy clothes, so we buy less clothes. In total, we spend a lot less. It’s a whole system that we’ve tried to put in place over the years, to be less dependent on money. Everything in the city invites us to spend money, that’s for certain. Here we have a lot less. I’m losing the train of thought, but yeah: basically, here we are not tempted to spend.