What’s a Guilloche?

Guilloche: gē-ˈ(y)ōsh: a pattern (as on metalwork) made by interlacing curved lines.

This post is all about a new ornamental typeface that lets you go hog-wild with guilloches.

Guilloches were – in the old days – used to make the falsification of banknotes more difficult. The engraving of these intricate lines was done by a highly specialized mechanical machine, which was operated by an equally highly specialized engraving artist. Once the settings for a specific curve were changed back to zero it was very difficult, if not impossible to set them back to the old design.

The elegant type designer, Gert Wiescher says: “I have designed a useful set of Guilloches that join to form ribbons that create a kind of op-art 3d effect. Under the keys A-U and a-u you find joining pieces. Under the keys V-Z and v-z I placed start- and end pieces. 0-4 are different length straight extensions and 5-9 are not quite so straight extensions. All other keys are corner pieces that can be used as stand-alones or put in rows to make for superb decoration. With a little bit of experimentation and maybe colored overlays you can achieve super-phantastic designs.”

I took Gert’s advice and dove right into my guilloche experimentation. Here’s what I came up with including the letters used to make my “super-phantastic” designs:

Create:

Color:

Los Angeles:

Reddoor:

AEFY (spells nothing, but was my quick attempt at creating a pleasing looking ribbon):

Well done MyFonts. I thoroughly enjoyed my 15 minutes of playing around with your font preview functionality. Thanks. Give “Guilloche A” a try for yourself.

Now all we need is a client who wants to use Guilloche…