Lucas Descroix is a graphic and type designer living between France and Germany. “I started making typefaces while I was studying as a way to produce my own raw material to use in books and posters,” Lucas tells It’s Nice That. “What convinced me to dig deeper was a realisation that despite being often discreet and seemingly simple-looking, typography is at the crossroads of different fields. Depending on the project, it’s going to lead you to learn about history, optics or linguistics, to name a few. It’s just so rich!” Across his projects, he finds that he is drawn towards the question of consistency within a typeface or type family.

His enthusiasm for type design is not only reflected in his detail-oriented approach to his typefaces but also the significant amount of research and writing that he does for each of his projects. His display font Nostra, for instance, was accompanied by a rather enjoyable 1,000-word essay titled A kilo of lead and a kilo of feathers on its origins. It wasn’t just filled with fluff copy either, but a reflection of his passion for the discipline. “I really like the exercise of writing about my typefaces when they’re published. It’s never easy but always rewarding to pull threads and actually unveil common patterns between projects that went in opposite directions,” Lucas says.

“I personally like to try and find a border between visible and legible and, lately, to translate what can be found on that border into more text-suitable typefaces,” Lucas says. One clear example of this is the aforementioned Nostra, an extra-wide monospaced display text that comes in an atypical pairing of a roman and italic. “Sett is heavy and stable like a brick wall while Stream, inspired by flourished scripts, graffiti and snakes in jars, is light and all in curves,” he says of the two styles of Nostra.

At the National Institute of Typographic Research in Nancy, France, he developed the idea that the two styles could be related beyond just their weight or style. For Nostra, the two are related in only one extreme parameter – their extended fixed-width. Hence the title of the essay, A kilo of lead and a kilo of feathers, two distinct forms “brought together by a common measurement.”