Justus Erich Walbaum (1768-1837), a confectioner by trade, carved his own cake molds. Quite gifted, he became a specialist, developing an activity as a punch-cutter, and eventually bought Ernst Wilhelm Kirschner’s type foundry. Considered to be one of the foremost creators of his time, he engraved gothic letters and Antiqua type, similar to those of Didot and Bodoni. But his romans had a different flavor, and for some, they contain the origins of the Grotesques that followed.
In 2010, Thomas Huot-Marchand and SPMillot were asked to develop the typographic identity of the Musée d’Orsay that had been based on Berthold Walbaum since its very beginnings. They proposed adding distant “cousins” in later typographic styles: a bold grotesque and a thin slab serif, but these typefaces would ultimately remain unused.
In 2020, Thomas Huot-Marchand decided to redesign them while developing an extended family. Album is a subtraction of Walbaum: with no serifs for Album Sans and with no contrast for Album Slab. Its silhouette retains some memory of the particular proportions and slightly flattened curves of Walbaum.
Album Slab has almost no contrast. The thicknesses of the stems correspond to the three lightest weights of the Sans version. The ball terminals, accentuated in the thinnest versions, recall typewritten letters, but with proportional tracking. An informal rereading of Walbaum, Album Slab can be perfectly combined with Sans and its italics.