Clement Cases’ typeface Base Pixel slowly turns to “trash”

Since we last caught up with type designer Clement Cases, he’s taken the plunge and “thrown himself into the unknown”, starting freelance life at the end of 2023. “I must have a lucky star looking out for me,” he says, because the designer has been snapped up for all kinds of projects over the last two years. One being his latest custom typeface in collaboration with Base – an open source crypto platform created by Coinbase.

“The project was to create a custom font, then design posters and turn them into NFTs. The typography would be available for a limited time and only available by purchasing the NFT,” the designer shares. Having complete creative freedom on this limited edition letterset, Clement had to set himself some constraints to move forward. Not being at all familiar with the world of crypto or NFTs, the type designer found a way to create links between his practice by leaning into his love of variable typography and the digital world – a universe made by pixels. “I wondered what it would be like to have a typeface that would degrade in resolution depending on its weight,” he says. “I’d never seen a typeface that had done that before, so I thought it would be super exciting.”

As a designer, Clement likes to create contrast in a project, and so he also became very interested in the structure of carved Roman typography. He took inspiration from these ancient letterforms, carved into stone, as he thought they would create an interesting conversation between the digital universe that builds type today and ancient inscriptions. “Mixing references that aren’t obviously mixable interests me; contrasts of time and reference are something I like to use in my work,” he says.

The resulting typeface Base Pixel is a playful take on this combination. It’s a pixel font that, when in its thinnest weight, its building blocks are completely invisible, and in its heavier weights these clunky digital squares are uncovered, sticking out of jagged edges. In its fifth and final weight “trash”, the fonts pixels are completely deformed, giving way to degrading letter forms with expressive and abstract variations. True to the ancient architecture of letterforms, the typeface was finished with “triangular serifs” and “proportions inspired by roman inscriptions”.

The biggest challenge of the project was pushing the boundaries of variable font technology to see just how far they could take this flexible element of the resolution – “managing the interpolations between the different weights” to create changes in resolution, or in other words “the technical part”, Clement says. “But when it works well, the result is there, and I found it fascinating to see all the movements, that gave me the energy to continue.”

Upon its release, the typeface was set to not just degrade but disappear entirely within 80 days, so Base Pixel is available exclusively through Base collections until 29 April.