Fantasy-lover Daytona Mess is beating the final boss: text typefaces

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.

The Dargon typeface will function as a complete text typeface from Ando, and mark her final project on her master’s programme complete. Interestingly, while a lot of designers and artists can find crits and presentations in a formal education context constricting, it was a presentation handout that compelled us to reach out to Ando again.

“For our final project, we have presentations periodically, serving as checkpoints to make sure we are on track for our final project,” she says. “I chose to give each of my presentations and handouts a different theme, but with the concept of the sword as its red line.” For the first handout, Ando made trading cards and printed a sword on the cover; in the second, the entire publication was cut into the shape of a blade that would make Guts from Berserk himself weep.

It’s a simple detail, but it’s easy to forget the power of typography, to not only help us read, but help us escape; Ando’s handout is a welcome reminder of how you can build a world through a typeface. “I enjoy art and graphic design so much, but I think type is the ultimate magical power you can have,” she says. Shapes of letters matter, and letters put together make words, words make sentences, make texts, make books, make worlds. And I love that so much.”