According to Anne-Dauphine Borione (also known as Daytona Mess, or just Ando), the success of her final master project hinges entirely on one thing: her capacity to resist playing Baldur’s Gate 3, the Dungeons and Dragons offshoot RPG, until she receives her diploma. Some might say it’s a cruel twist of fate that her final project is also based on the concept of fantasy, and the success of that enterprise requires her to engage constantly with characters like Lae’zel from Baldur’s Gate 3, and all sorts of other highly distracting sword-wielding beings.
It is, for Ando, an acceptable problem. “I think I have always been inspired by fantasy, since my youngest age; I am constantly half lost in a world where I am a dragon slayer (or rider, depending on my mood), wielding magic and completing quests,” she says. Her final project for TypeMedia (a one-year Type Design MA at Royal Academy of Art, The Hague) was born from this obsession – specifically, the tabletop card game Magic the Gathering, which uses the 16th-century, punchcut-inspired Plantin as its text typeface. Inspired, Ando set out to create her own version of a fantasy text typeface, called Dargon.
For those that are not familiar with Ando, she studied Fine Arts first (at Central Saint Martins), before taking the path of a type designer. In the type world, her nickname is Daytona Mess – which Ando also plans to be the name of her future foundry. This creative path has always given Ando a very artistic approach to type design, “which translates with a pronounced taste for display type,” as she puts it. A previous hot air balloon typeface from Ando is a good example. It featured contrasting strokes which, at their most extreme, were as thin as hair; beautiful, and entirely non-functional for body copy.
But Ando wants to change her ways. Though the designer will never view type as purely functional – “if type design exclusively served the purpose of being legible, I would not like to be a type designer” – she sees text fonts as the final hurdle to overcome; with this, she’ll be unstoppable.
