The main inspiration is from Art Nouveau which flourished in Europe at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. This design included furniture (Majorelle, Lalique) and architecture (Victor Horta, Henry Van de Velde, Gaudi, Alfons Mucha). But Hector Guimard remains the favorite for all aspects of its art and, of course, its typefaces used on the Parisian Metropolitan posters. In particular, the various kerning of the various letters he used to make the poster a whole design from singular designs, leading to numerous variations. As a designer, I first worked with the individual glyphs Hector Guimard designed and I discovered that they vary constantly from a poster to another, depending on the overall result he was looking for. Another difficulty in transferring his design to printing is that there was no lower case. I was excited to create the whole font from the original designs of Hector Guimard, incorporating its variations and "crazy kerning". After several attempts, it appeared to be impossible to include all variations and I slightly moved to my own new design as a complete font, upper and lower case, with kerning. I voluntarily limited the ascenders and descenders to the usual typography so that it can be used from 10 / 12 points. This version can be used to edit letters and books in the context of Art, specially Art Nouveau and Art Deco of course, posters of any kind.

Minotaur is an original monoline design based on an Oscan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscan_language ) votive inscription from the second century B.C.E. The letterforms immediately caught my eye in the wonderful book, Lettering by Hermann Degering, and I decided to create a typeface based on them with only enough compromises to make it usable as a modern alphabet. Not quite as straightforward as I had hoped. For example, the Oscan language (the predominant language in the Italian peninsula before the ascendance of Latin), has no letter "O", so the distinctive curve of the "D" was used as the model for the rounded letters "C" and "G" and more subtly for "O" and "Q"; this shape is also echoed in the original design of "B", "P" and "R". Also, the Oscan letterforms for A, K, L, M, N, S, and U are rather quaint, so I've included modern forms as alternates. Minotaur offers the best of both worlds: Just as the mythical Minotaur is half man and half bull, the font Minotaur is half modern and half ancient. Thanks to OpenType features (stylistic sets), you can easily switch from ancient letterforms to modern (if you have an OpenType-savvy application such as Adobe InDesign) for Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets. Minotaur supports all modern European languages, including Modern (monotonic) Greek and those that use the Cyrillic alphabet. And, yes, it supports Oscan, both right-facing and left-facing. Minotaur includes 3 OpenType Stylistic Sets: 1 - converts ancient (default) letterforms (A, K, L, M, N, S, and U) to modern alternates; 2 - converts Latin letterforms to equivalent left-facing (standard) Oscan letterforms; 3 - converts Latin letterforms to equivalent right-facing Oscan letterforms.