Beyond Bézier – Explorations of drawing methods in type design
In the age of early digital type, several methods were explored to draw letterforms. One of them, the Bézier spline, an algorithm that generates curves with a small quantity of data, has the crucial advantage of sparing computer memory and processing resources. As a result, drawing type with Bézier curves became the industry standard, and remains so today. This project aims to question and reevaluate this standard, to move beyond established trends, and to develop innovative, liberating ideas by exploring alternative methods of drawing curves and letterforms.
Beyond Bézier is a research project with contributions by Matthieu Cortat-Roller, Alice Savoie, Kai Bernau, Radim Peško, Micha Wasem and Florence Yerly. The project started in September 2023 and was completed in May 2025. Raphaela Haefliger and Roland Früh were responsible for coordination and Nicolas Bernklau for design.
Director of ECAL
Alexis Georgacopoulos
Head of Research and Development
Davide Fornari
Head of ECAL Master in Type Design
Matthieu Cortat-Roller
Researchers, ECAL
Kai Bernau has taught type design at ECAL MATD, and before that ECAL MAAD, since 2011. His practice, Atelier Carvalho Bernau, designs reading experiences, from typefaces to interfaces, for culture and commerce. Commissions range from publications like the New York Times and Esquire, and publishers such as Walther König and Phaidon, to luxury brand Marsèll, cultural institutions Culturgest Lisbon and Villa Stuck in Munich, to academic clients like Brill publishers, Leiden and University of Warwick. The retail typefaces they created or collaborated on (Neutraface Slab, Publico, Lyon, Atlas, Neutral, Algebra) are used by leading brands and publications around the world. Previous achievements in generative, computer-aided design include a typeface system for Sandberg Institute, and art direction for Octavo publishers, Amsterdam. Kai Bernau holds a Masters degree from Type & Media in The Hague. He lives and works in Porto.
Matthieu Cortat-Roller is Head of Master Type Design at ECAL since its creation in 2016 and a type designer creating Latin, Greek and Cyrillic typefaces for retail through 205tf, and custom commissions for clients such as Caran d’Ache, Lausanne City Council, Fondation Louis Vuitton and Eurovision TV channel. In 2013 he was in charge of creating the Corpus Typographique Français, a digital archive collecting typefaces designed in France since 1845. From 2014–15 he reshaped the permanent collections of the Museum of Printing and Graphic Communication in Lyon (with Alan Marshall and Sheza Moledina), before becoming their scientific advisor from 2015–18. He is the co-editor (with Davide Fornari) of Archigraphiæ (ECAL Editions, Renens, 2019), a collection of essays around the practice of monumental stone lettering in Italy during the Fascist period. He also directed a study and publication on the Syriac script (Aram, ECAL Editions, Renens, 2021). In 2020, he was project coordinator of the Research project AIZI, Artificial-intelligence type design for Chinese script, which was nominated for the 2022 Swiss Design Awards in the Research category. He lives and works in Lyon.
Radim Peško is a designer and typographer. In 2010 he established his RP Digital Type Foundry which specialises in typefaces that are both formally and conceptually distinctive. He has created original typefaces for cultural institutions such as Boijmans Museum, Rotterdam; Eastside Projects, Birmingham; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Aspen Art Museum; Fridericianum, Kassel; and the Berlin Biennale; as well as for companies such as Paco Rabbane and McKinsey & Co. Other work includes visual identities for Secession in Vienna; Krabbesholm Højskole in Denmark; and various exhibition projects in which the role of designer and design are examined, redefined or put into the question. In 2011 he became a chairman of the International Biennial of Graphic design in Brno, co-curating the 2014 and 2016 editions and co-editing the accompanying catalogues, with a focus on the subject of education. His most recent project, the ongoing exhibition ‘WMDYWTL’, deals with fiction in design and design fiction, and so far has travelled to Brno, Nice, Kasterlee, Melbourne and Tokyo. He has taught at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, the Royal College of Art, London, and is currently a visiting lecturer on the Master Type Design, ECAL and Professor at ISIA Urbino. He lives and works in London.
Alice Savoie is a typeface designer, researcher, and teacher. She graduated from the École Duperré and the École Estienne in Paris and holds an MA and a PhD from the University of Reading. She collaborates with international clients and foundries on the creation of custom typefaces. Her own designs include Capucine, Faune, Romain 20, and Lucette. From 2018–2021, she led the research project ‘Women in Type’ at the University of Reading, funded by the Leverhulme Trust under the supervision of Professor Fiona Ross. She is currently engaged in the research project ‘Reception of the New Typography in Francophone Graphic Scenes’ under the supervision of Professors Catherine de Smet (Université Paris 8) and Davide Fornari (ECAL-HES-SO). She teaches and supervises research projects at the Atelier National de Recherche Typographique (ANRT), Nancy; ECAL, Lausanne; and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), Paris-Sorbonne. She co-edits the Poem Pamphlet series for Poem éditions alongside Jérôme Knebusch. She lives and works in Lyon.
Researchers, HEIA–FR
Micha Wasem is a mathematician working at the Haute école d’ingénierie et d’architecture de Fribourg since 2016. His PhD thesis obtained from ETH Zurich in 2016 in the area of differential geometry contains results on curves in Euclidean spaces (i.e. curves with prescribed curvature or curves satisfying certain first order differential constraints) with an emphasis on obtaining concrete implementable results which might lead to visualisations of the objects of interest. In this context, in 2015, together with two collaborators, he obtained the first visualisation of approximating Legendre curves in Euclidean 3-space. In a more recent collaboration, in an attempt to generalise a 200-year-old theorem by Jean-Victor Poncelet, special types of pairs of closed plane curves were investigated, which admit a polygonal closure figure inscribed in one curve and circumscribed about the other. He lives and works in Fribourg.
Florence Yerly is an associate professor at the Haute école d’ingénierie et d’architecture de Fribourg since 2012, where she teaches mathematics, statistics and physics. In 2015 she obtained her PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Fribourg. She has always been interested in the use of mathematics in various fields, working in systems biology, genetics, micropaleontology and chemistry. Her expertise is in mathematical modelling i.e. how one can describe a real-life problem with mathematics and then find properties and characteristics from the solutions. Her background in mathematics and statistics is augmented by her programming skills in Python, Matlab and R. She lives and works in Fribourg.
Coordination
Design
Development
Video and sound recording and editing
Typefaces
