Marcel

The font Marcel is named in honor of Marcel Heuzé, a Frenchman who was conscripted into labor during World War II. During the months Marcel was in Germany, he wrote letters to his beloved wife and daughters back home in rural France. Marcel’s letters contain rare first-person testimony of day-to-day survival within a labor camp, along with the most beautiful expressions of love imaginable. The letters — stained and scarred with censor marks — were the original source documents used by designer Carolyn Porter to create a script font that retains the expressive character of Marcel Heuzé’s original handwriting.

The result of years of research and design work, Marcel Script Pro® features more than 1300 glyphs. The font is a highly readable running script that includes textural details that capture the look of ink on paper. The font Marcel Caps is a hand-lettered titling face intended as a companion to the Script. Marcel EuroPost One and Two each feature more than 200 postmarks, cancellation and censor marks, and other embellishments found on historical letters and documents.

Marcel has received multiple awards and honors, from: New York Type Director’s Club, a Certificate for Typographic Excellence; Communication Arts magazine; PRINT magazine; and AIGA-Minnesota. Marcel was also selected for the international 2015 Project Passion exhibition.

The story of the design of the font is woven together with Carolyn’s fervent search for information about Marcel in the book Marcel’s Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man’s Fate (Skyhorse Publishers, June 2017).