How Matthieu Salvaggio grew Blaze Type from three fonts to 100+

The Brand Identity: Matthieu Salvaggio started Blaze Type in 2016 with three type families, no formal training in type design and no business plan. A decade on, the independent French foundry distributes over 100 typeface families by designers from around the world, and has produced custom type for H&M, the Fédération Française de Football and BVB Borussia Dortmund. Salvaggio learned to draw letterforms by studying classics and being ruthlessly self-critical, and he curates the foundry’s growing catalogue the same way: guided by instinct and a soft spot for sharp serifs.

An OVH data centre fire in 2021 destroyed Blaze Type’s servers and backups in a single night, forcing a rebuild that the foundry then lived with for almost five years. In this conversation, Salvaggio discusses the new blazetype.eu website, the experience of self-teaching, and why he has never found running the foundry challenging. TBI Hey Matthieu! How are you? MS All is well, thank you! A lot of work is being done on mini updates on the fly on the new website with the design and dev team, and lots of incoming typefaces to curate. But I can’t be happier! TBI The new blazetype.eu looks great!

Why the change, and what were the biggest priorities going in? MS The main thing was to think of a better solution to showcase the complexity of the typeface families we distribute (most of our typefaces have a lot of weights/styles) the second one was to think of a nicer way of displaying the font catalogue. We’ve got over 100 typefaces now and we want to showcase them all as best as possible. TBI The site includes a type pairing tool – can you tell us about the need for that? MS I don’t know if there is really a need for it, but it’s an interesting way to test and experiment with pairing our typefaces in different ways.

You know, most of the time we’re driven by our will to do things because we are excited about them. They don’t always have to serve a certain purpose other than us having fun creating things for people to experiment with. TBI The previous site was essentially an emergency rebuild after the OVH data centre fire in 2021 – what was that like, and how come you stuck with that version for almost five years? MS To be fair, it was not completely an emergency rebuild.

We had been working with Guido Ferreyra for several months on the release of Blaze Type 2.0, and we were probably 60% ready with it when the OVH data centre burned and turned our server (and backup server!) to ashes. To tell you more about the day it happened, I was at the office and couldn’t access our email. Checked blazetype.eu, no DNS.

I called Samuel Gadea (who was the designer and dev behind Blaze Type 1.0) to ask him about it, and as I was doing so, I checked the news and saw the OVH data centre in Strasbourg had burnt completely. I was, to say the least, really worried. While Samuel was trying to recover an old physical backup he had of the v1 website, I set up an emergency website using Squarespace, which was our backup for several weeks (I spent probably 72 hours with barely any sleep setting that up as fast as I could).

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The article highlights a successful growth story in the typography sector, which is significant for brand strategy professionals, though the concepts of adaptability and community engagement are commonly discussed in the industry.