What if the letters surrounding us told a story? They are read every day without necessarily being understood. Yet a typeface can reveal an era, a culture, a language, or a way of seeing the world. Typography can also make a message more legible, assert an identity, or give personality to an object, a brand, or a space. It can also transform how a building, a publication, a poster, or a web environment is perceived. This is the familiar yet little-known world that ECAL A Typographic Atlas invites us to discover, presented in its Canadian premiere at UQAM's Centre de design from September 10 to October 4, 2026.

An exploration of the world of type design

The traveling exhibition, originating from the École cantonale d'art de Lausanne (ECAL), brings together more than 300 typefaces from its Master Type Design and Bachelor Graphic Design programs. Initiated by Angelo Benedetto and Matthieu Cortat-Roller, both program directors at ECAL, the exhibition will be presented at UQAM's Centre de design in an enriched format featuring a section devoted to Québec typographic creation and an immersive multilingual projection installation.

A collaboration between two schools renowned for their graphic design programs

Since its founding in 2016, ECAL's Master Type Design program has welcomed hundreds of students from 27 countries. The typefaces created by these students form a visual, cultural, and linguistic atlas reflecting writing systems from around the world — alphabets, abugidas, abjads, hanzi, and kanji — inviting the public to discover the diversity of languages and the ways they are represented and written. The Master Type Design program offers specialized training in typeface design, covering different writing systems, the technical dimensions of font production, and theoretical questions of typography.

“This exhibition resonates in a particular way at UQAM's Centre de design. ECAL and UQAM's École de design share a common belief that good design can emerge from research and experimentation while giving us a thoughtful reflection of our environment. By bringing ECAL's work to Montréal alongside a first large-scale portrait of Québec's typographic creation, this collaboration puts practices from international and local contexts into dialogue. It also reveals to the general public something we encounter every day without necessarily seeing it: letters are truly part of our culture and our shared visual environment,” says Patrick Evans, director of UQAM's Centre de design.

A first survey of Québec typography: More than 600 Québec projects in 15 years

For its presentation at UQAM's Centre de design, the typographical atlas is enriched with a local component developed by Louise Paradis, a professor at the École de design, in collaboration with UQAM's École de design and the 2026–2027 cohort of Collectif 1440 — a type foundry created in 2025 by École de design students. This component brings together a selection of 138 typographic creations from a diverse range of creators: students, teachers, independent designers, collectives, studios, and foundries. This selection stems from an unprecedented survey covering fifteen years of local production, documented in a publication accompanying the exhibition.

The Québec component of the exhibition also features a 360-degree immersive installation in which some thirty languages take shape through typefaces. The installation transcribes, in real time, interviews conducted with international and Québec designers, in thirty languages — including French, English, Mohawk, Atikamekw, and Inuktitut, alongside languages such as Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Gaelic Irish, Russian, Wolof, and Haitian Creole. Composed from typefaces drawn from ECAL's corpus and the Québec selection, these contributions take on particular resonance in the Québec context, marked by a plurality of languages and relationships to writing.

Visitors will discover, among others, Julia Born, a Swiss graphic designer and winner of the 2021 Swiss Grand Prix for Design (career recognition), and Fabian Harb, a Swiss graphic designer and type designer, who co-founded Dinamo with Johannes Breyer in 2013 — one of the most influential independent foundries on the contemporary international typography scene.

In the absence of any existing comprehensive overview, the team led by Louise Paradis carried out one of the first systematic surveys of contemporary Québec typographic creation. At the end of this near-exhaustive process, the database included 601 projects, 138 of which were selected for the exhibition.

“This may be the main outcome of this research: taken together, the 601 projects surveyed reveal, beyond the forms themselves, an entire ecosystem of practices, career paths, collaborations, and knowledge transmission. At once omnipresent and invisible, typefaces directly influence how we communicate, acting as a kind of mediator. We hope this survey will serve as a foundation for further research,” notes Louise Paradis, professor at UQAM's École de design and curator of the exhibition's Québec component.

A few landmarks of the Québec typography scene

Type foundries (a company or structure that designs, produces, publishes, and/or distributes typefaces):

Collectif 1440, Coppers and Brasses (founded in 2011 by Étienne Aubert Bonn and Alexandre Saumier Demers), Feedtype (founded in 2017 by Anouk Pennel and Raphaël Daudelin), and Pangram Pangram (founded in 2018 by Mathieu Desjardins).

Notable typefaces created in Québec:

• Olympic Headline, designed by Julien Hébert (studio Principal) for the identity of the International Olympic Committee;

• Ilisarniq, by Coppers and Brasses, designed for the Kativik School Board in Nunavik;

• Latitude, by Judith Poirier, a wooden letterpress typeface combining the Latin alphabet and the Inuktitut syllabary, developed with Thomassie Mangiok and the Inuit community.

École de design faculty members featured in the local component: Louise Paradis, Judith Poirier, Amandine Alessandra, and Matthias Kreutzer.

Curator profiles

Matthieu Cortat-Roller has directed ECAL's Master Type Design program since its creation in 2016. A designer and typographer, he co-curates ECAL A Typographic Atlas alongside Angelo Benedetto, who directs ECAL's Bachelor Graphic Design program.

Louise Paradis is a professor at UQAM's École de design and an ECAL graduate. She curates the exhibition's Québec component, developed in collaboration with Collectif 1440.