Speaker Matthieu Cortat-Roller

Matthieu Cortat is a type designer, creating custom fonts (with clients such as Caran d’Ache, Lausanne City Council, Fondation Louis Vuitton, and Eurovision TV channel) and retail typefaces, distributed from Lyon by 205TF. Since 2016, he is Head of the Master in Type Design at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne (HES-SO), where he teaches his students how to create typographic shapes from non-typographic references, such as musical pieces. Interested in the history and present of type design, he co-edited a publication about rationalist lettering in fascist Italy (Archigraphiæ, 2019) and a publication on Syriac, an endangered script (Aram, 2021). He participated in “AIZI, Artificial-intelligence type design for Chinese script”, a Research project during which he developed a teaching “method” inspired by the pedagogy of the Swiss sinologist Jean-François Billeter.

Instagram @ecalmatd