Uxum 2.0 is a grotesk with a big personality that celebrates imperfect beauty and Basque heritage

Deviating from the neutrality that many grotesk typefaces pride themselves on, Uxum – a “noisy” grotesk – has personality in abundance and a clear cultural voice. The starting point, explains Designer & Coordinator Julien Fesquet, was a commissioned typeface based around Basque stone carving traditions. “Luc Chaissac (Producer), Vincent Lacombe (Type Designer), and I,” he tells us, “decided to refine it fully, rethinking the letterforms and considering how we can enrich the glyph set by making it more meaningful in relation to its origins.” The trio aimed to develop a complete typeface that would include all the necessary glyphs and weights. They thoroughly investigated stone carvings in Roman heritage, and rather than simply copying traditional Basque letterforms or “reintroducing stereotype shapes like the A-bar”, they sought to understand the underlying principles and techniques that gave these characters their defining qualities.