Blaze Type 3.0

Blaze Type has relaunched its website—not out of ambition, but out of necessity. The old platform had become slow, navigation was cumbersome, and with a constantly growing catalog, finding the right typefaces was increasingly difficult.

Over a year ago, Founder Matthieu Salvaggio and his team decided to start from scratch: design, development, art direction, and content were completely rethought. Together with longtime collaborators at UXO × Nuuk Agency, they built a platform that is fast, intuitive, and easy to navigate. The site also revives the original color principles as a foundation and introduces a long-awaited type pairing tool, allowing users to experiment and combine fonts directly online.

We spoke with Matthieu Salvaggio, Founder of Blaze Type, about how the type foundry’s redesigned website and new tools bring its mission to life, make typography more accessible, and offer a seamless experience for a growing community of type enthusiasts and designers.

The catalog is now easy to navigate—browsable, fast, and designed so users can find what they’re looking for quicker, smoother and more efficiently. How did you manage to combine this level of usability with maintaining Blaze Type’s distinctive identity?

Matthieu: Our catalogue has indeed quite developed, over the years we went from a dozen type families to over a hundred. And the navigation, the whole experience of the website as been the center of my mind for many years. It’s been something that I’ve wanted to fix for a long time. In full honesty I’m not sure there is a “best” solution to navigate that many fonts and promote them all to the same level—even though we try our best to do that—but the solution we found is quite satisfying compared to what we had before.
We worked with the team of designers at UXO / Nuuk Agency in a very scientific way of doing things: we analyzed the data of the website. How people were interacting with the different pages, fonts, how they were looking at the case studies, reading the articles etc. Based on those information we’ve made changes accordingly. So we’re really looking at a balance between design aesthetics that we wanted to bring on (more colors, animations etc.) and the calmness and stability of a clear navigation so you can access information in the most enjoyable way.

The rebuild was handled by a small, close-knit team. How did working so closely together shape the design process and influence the final experience for users?

I’ve known the people at UXO / Nuuk agency for years. Will and Sebastien, the founders, have been close friends of mine for nearly a decade as well. So they’ve always kind of gravitated around what Blaze Type was doing. And we know each other well so it was really a smooth discussion. Xiao, who worked on the design, was also a great addition to work with. She really understood the aim we had—design wise, and managed to bring forward the vision I had.

I don’t know if the users can feel it, but in my experience whenever you have fun creating something, it shows. I hope they people can witness how much fun we had working together to bring Blaze Type 3.0 up.

With the new type pairing tool and the expanded catalog, what do you hope users will discover, experiment with, or enjoy most on the site?

I hope people will try the pairing tools and enjoy it, I’ve got more ideas to implement into it (like generating semi specimen would be cool, and other cool features). What I want most is simply people to enjoy navigating the different areas. We write a lot of articles about design, type design, interviews etc. We try to create a quality content as best as we can. We’ve got a weekly newsletter with a monthly “Bulletin” bringing news about the type world—everything regarding it not only our stuff. So in a way we tried to create a type content related place, not just a type foundry. I hope people will get to discover our designers and enjoy their work.

Take some time to explore the website, try things out, and discover what resonates most.