Failles Flots Fils Flammes website

Failles Flots Fils Flammes is a website created for translator and writer Joëlle Marelli (and her alter ego Jo Mrelli). Conceived as a creative space for the diverse writing practices of the author, the website is divided into four categories: one dedicated to the work in progress, experiments; another to theoretic texts; one to interventions; and a last one to reflections about translation.

The website was designed by studio des formes, who chose to work with Spectral from Production Type. The elegance of the typeface and its synthetic aesthetic manage to render a literary aspect to the texts, while being perfectly adequate to the materiality of the surface of the screen. This digital journal, neither a diary nor a blog, is in between: it finds a specific form for a type of space not yet defined on the web. Spectral helps reconciling the apparent antagonic aspects of a private yet literary writing made visible. Conceived in the legacy of Elzevir typefaces but optimized for immersive reading on screen, Spectral brings a literary style rooted in our visual imagination for centuries into the mutable space of web design. One detail we enjoyed in particular is the possibility to switch from light to dark mode, making even more visible the will to create a reading and writing space dedicated to the web: the usual hierarchy between black typeface and white paper (twisted here with the use of a light colored tone) is overthrown, showing at the same time the new mobility of text on screen.

Spectral is complemented with Work Sans for menu and navigation.