Jose Mendoza & Almeida

José Mendoza y Almeida was perhaps the most internationally active 20th century French type designer. While he also produced work for local distributors, his most significant faces were published by companies abroad, including the Amsterdam Typefoundry, Monotype, and ITC.

Born in 1926, Mendoza’s career has been primarily devoted to activities in the fields of graphic design, illustration, and calligraphy. During his professional career, he has never worked as a full-time type designer, although he was a typographic educator from 1985–1990. His Pascal, Photina, and ITC Mendoza Roman typefaces are currently on the market, and each has played its own significant role in the history of 20th century type.

He´s the subject of a new book

The Paris-based Blibliothèque Typographique announced José Mendoza y Almeida in February. This is the first full-volume text in any language dedicated to Mendoza. The exquisite 169-page book offers a detailed glimpse into his type design work. Its bilingual text will hopefully ensure more recognition for Mendoza both at home and internationally.

Drawing for Photina

I must admit that before reading this book, I was not very familiar with Mendoza or his typefaces. On the occasions where I had come across his name, it was most often in connection with Photina. With so many typefaces to juggle in your mind, it is often only too easy to categorize them into little cupboards; you make associations in your head based on things you hear people say. Whenever I heard “Photina,” the bell that went off for me was, “the first good phototype family!” Yet this never drove me to the specimen books to examine Photina’s forms for myself. After reading this book, I can safely say how great a pity that was. Conceived as a kind of serif counterpart to Univers – in terms of family size and structure, not design – only eight weights of Photina were ever actually released. But Photina’s forms are ground-breakingly interesting, and this book displays them well. What would the family have looked like if all of the intended weights had been finished? How large an effect on the course of type design’s development would an enlarged Photina have had on the 1970s? Or on the 1980s? Pondering this book’s essay on Photina raises many “what if?” questions, a recurring theme throughout the text.

Why You should care

The more experience that I gain as a type designer, the more I realize how little I know or understand regarding the depths of French typeface history. Glancing at the surface of things, it would seem that there has been an unbroken lineage of excellence handed down from the past half-millennium that runs from Garamond, Granjon, and Jannon through to the Romain du Roi concept, the work of the Fourniers and Didots, across to the 20th and 21st centuries. The past 100 years alone have brought us the work of Georges Peignot, A.M. Cassandre, Marcel Jacno, François Ganeau, Roger Excoffon, Ladislas Mandel, Thierry Puyfoulhoux, Franck Jalleau, and Jean François Porchez. And this is before one mentions that the bulk of Adrian Frutiger’s career was spent working in France. There is also the writing of Maximilien Vox to consider. Several of my favorite designers from my own generation are French, including Jean-Baptiste Levée, Mathieu Réguer, and Jonathan Perez.

The problem with creating lists like the one above is that a tremendous amount is left out. History is not made up of the signposts along a trail, but rather by the footprints along the path. Rattling off a list of names offers no real understanding of why certain forms look the way they do, what drove the artisans who made them, and what all of this has to offer us in our current practice.

More about the book

The strength of this book is the in-depth presentation of Mendoza’s three most-significant typefaces. Many photographs of Mendoza’s original sketches and production drawings are included in the book, artefacts that are disappearing from type design practice. Reading the book, I asked myself, how will the work of my own type-designer generation be documented by future historians? We do not leave behind the same breadcrumbs as our recent forebears.

Called the “godfather” of French type design by the authors, perhaps a more apt description for Mendoza might be “unsung hero.” His contribution to the canon of French design is significant, and may become more established with this book. Since Mendoza is not well-known to recent generations of designers—especially outside of France—more biographical information about him would have been interesting. In many ways, José Mendoza y Almeida reminds me of Fred Smeijers’ Type now. Both books have similar dimensions. The focus of José Mendoza y Almeida is narrower; it includes five essays encapsulating the process behind specific typefaces, or styles of typefaces, designed by Mendoza. The essays include:

1. Pascal (Martin Majoor)
2. Photina (Sébastien Morlighem)
3. Five calligraphic typefaces (Martin Majoor)
4. The invention of the “mécalde” (Sébastien Morlighem)
5. ITC Mendoza Roman (Sébastien Morlighem)

Above: Drawings for Mendoza Script

Original and more Information. Thanks to Ilovetypography