XX, XY

posted by Emily Gosling July 6, 2021

While there’s been a few long overdue celebrations of women type designers, we’ve not yet come across a comprehensive look at a different issue around gender and type: the relationship between gender stereotypes and letterforms themselves: the relationship between gender stereotypes and letterforms themselves.

As the author of a new book about the subject titled XX, XY Marie Boulanger, points out, “how many times have you heard an art director or a client saying that a typeface choice was too feminine, or not manly enough?”

The book, the first of its kind to its creator’s knowledge, aims to both investigate the idea of gender stereotypes’ relationship with type and also discuss what the design community can do about it.

Boulanger originally wrote XX,XY as her MA thesis during her time studying at type design at ECV Paris. Her choice of topic was motivated by the ongoing debate in France about “inclusive writing” and the idea of making written language less gendered.

At the crux of her investigations was the question around what letters themselves say about gender stereotypes, and whether they carry as much weight around such stereotypes as the language they carry. As she worked on this complex inquiry, she found that there was no current research on the topic, while concurrently noting that it was an issue that seemed to really resonate with designers.

Her hunch around the theme’s relevance to the design industry was confirmed when Boulanger conducted interviews for her research, and again when she presented the project at Typecon Minneapolis in 2019. The result is a text that looks to balance academic rigour with a sense of playfulness.

Separating the two sections is a series of six interviews by renowned design professionals, including Louise Fili and Antoine Ricardou of design studio be-pôles.

The second half takes a more general look at the design and type industries, discussing the need for inclusivity and proposing possible solutions for the issues discussed in the first part of the book.

Those behind the book point out that the framework used to derive data and make research hypotheses in XX, XY is gender stereotypes, “which were born from a binary view of gender [that] we don’t endorse. They add that the project and study is focused on Latin typography not to be exclusionary, “but because this type of analysis requires a deep cultural, linguistic and typographic knowledge, which we only had in Latin. We have no doubt applying the research framework to other scripts would yield different and interesting results.”

Now based in London, Marie Boulanger is an independent type designer specialising in creating custom type for branding projects who studied graphic design at École Estienne before her type design course at ECV Paris. In 2020, she joined Positype Flourish, where she releases her retail typefaces, and has taught at Kingston University in London and ECV. She describes XX, XY as her “most important project to date” and says that she “sincerely believes that the research here needs to reach as many design professionals and students as possible, “because the way we think and talk about type informs design practices in a very pervasive way.”