Julien Priez
Analog thinking and digital tools
To become a type designer, you should find your own approach. At Estienne School in Paris, France, we studied calligraphy as a foundation for type design, imitating what we drew by hand on the screen. Since then, I have been walking on a bridge connecting these two disciplines, thinking on paper and drawing on the screen—not imitating one medium with the other, but using the different strengths of each set of tools available to me. I don’t do what I do by hand on the computer, and vice versa, but there is a strong structural, rather than visible, link between them. I will share my recipes and process for how I think with calligraphy to find ideas, structures and shapes for contemporary type design.
About Julien Priez
Julien Priez was born in Montreuil, France, in 1986. As a child he dreamed of becoming an illustrator, toy designer, or math teacher, but he ended up studying graphic and type design at the Lycée Eugénie Cotton in Montreuil and later at the École Estienne in Paris, where he fell in love with calligraphy. In 2015 he joined the High on Type collective. The following year, the Morisawa Type Design Competition awarded Priez and Michel Derre its Bronze Prize in the Latin category for their Abelha script typeface. With the transdisciplinary design studio WeShouldDoItAll (WSDIA), in 2019 he painted fourteen murals at Nike’s World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. In 2020, he and Yoann Minet created Boogy Brut, published by Bureau Brut. Priez designed Peugeot’s new custom typeface with Mathieu Réguer and Emmanuel Benoist in 2021. In 2023, the Centre du graphisme in Échirolles, France, mounted Priez’s solo exhibition The Boogy Show. In 2024, he joined Commercial Type for a new adventure.
