Mai

About the typeface

The Atelier Populaire didn't have a house style. They had urgency. Working through the night in occupied studios, student and worker printmakers produced hundreds of posters that somehow cohered into one of the most recognizable visual identities in the history of political art. Mai draws directly from that tradition. The letterforms are rooted in the rough, immediate quality of hand-drawn protest typography, stripped of decoration and built for impact. Three weights are currently available: Mai Smooth, Mai Ultrabold, and Mai Italic, each carrying the same restless energy at any size.

The story behind it

This typeface didn't start with typography. At fifteen, a run-in with the law landed me in a private school where a poet and printmaker named Gary Young ran a Book Arts class built around a Vandercook letterpress. That machine changed everything. Seven years later I was studying printmaking at UC Santa Cruz, working in stone lithography, photo lithography, intaglio, letterpress, and screen printing. When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, my practice shifted. I stopped making art about form and started making art about power. After graduating, I moved to San Francisco and found myself living around the corner from the Letterform Archive. Having written about the Atelier Populaire for years, I was now holding their work in my hands. Mai is what came next. It is a typeface in direct conversation with those posters: a continuation of their legacy, not a reproduction of it.