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Calling your font Pipo might cause some people to think there's a certain lack of seriousness on your part. After all, the name does call to mind a clown. Nothing could be further from the truth, though, and Benoît Bodhuin's first design for Gestalten Fonts might be playful, but the only thing it shares with a circus is the activity of traveling. Pipo - with its hand-drawn style and sinuous, tubular drawing - is all about departure and arrival. These characters are defined by the route they have undertaken during design, and Pipo can be used (should be used, according to its designer!) for a variety of things - expected and unexpected - resulting, once again, in a new destination.

After studying mathematics at university, enrolling at a school of graphic design, and a short stint in some agencies, I have worked as an independent graphic designer for a few years. I practice this profession in Lille (France) for clients with a consciousness about their image, mainly focusing on graphic identity, publishing, typography, and web design. I like to take my time for my personal work, allowing me more experimentation and research. They can - among other things - lead to typography.

www.benbenworld.com

Can you give us a short description of you and your current fields of work?
I am curious, and—apart from work for my customers—I like to play with shapes. Through research, I try to surprise myself. I like to work starting from a rather fuzzy idea and to note—stage after stage—how this idea stretches, twists, crosses with other ideas… This work—when it succeeds—generally becomes more concrete, in the form of typography, a pattern, or animation.

How did you start to develop the typeface Pipo? Did you have an idea or a concept before drawing the first sketches?
I had a bit of spare time. The starting idea for Pipo was to draw a stencil typography. The final drawing is rather far removed from the first sketch. The line became rounder, and the idea of a route for each letter was grafted with the starting idea.

Some characters from Pipo are reminiscent of hand-drawn letters, but the whole font has a genuinely fabricated look. Why?
It is this idea of a route which lends La Pipo a handwritten character. Each letter has a departure point and an arrival point. This constraint plays a big role in Pipo's character and gives certain letters an original trace original.  But each letter is also pressed on a grid.

Can you imagine a particularly good application of it, or are there no wishes on your part how you could envision the font?
All of the application requires a stencil typography, but not only that: Characteristics evoked with the top—the route, the handwritten aspect, but also the sinuous and tubular drawing—are also channels to use the font, for the packaging of a bulb for example. But I think that I prefer to leave it up to the designer to find good applications, whether they be expected or unexpected. 

How did you get into typography? And what motivates you to do  it on a daily basis? 
Typography is like a trap for me. I like to draw one letter, then two, then three. Then you get a sort of vicious circle: the accents, the punctuation, the tied letters… And that's when I can't make a U-turn anymore!

Is there any designer or typographer who has inspired you or who you still feel influenced by?
No, I let myself be influenced by many trends and people, even if I have followed certain people's work from the beginning. For example, that's the case with Pierre di Sciullo. I appreciate his way of crossing various fields of design, always with a singular glance.