Fonts released by Neufville Digital:
Pascal TM
Fidelio TM
Sully Jonquières TMThe type designing career of J. Mendoza spans the most turbulent era in typographic trade, from letterpress to photo typesetting to digital fonts.
Starting designing typefaces for metal typesetting, he worked for Deberny & Peignot, Clichés-Union and Olive; he designed typefaces for Lettergieterij Amsterdam, Hollenstein Phototypo, typoGabor, Monotype and ITC and dry transfer lettering for Mecanorma.
In 1985 he is a cofounder of l'Atelier Nationale de Création Tyographique, at the Imprimerie Nationale, where he teaches type design.
PASCAL (1953-1999).
Pascal dates back to 1953 and is inspired by an incised alphabet drawn by his father, Guillermo de Mendoza in 1943, a year before his death.
Contrary to the formal design of Swiss and German sans serif typefaces at that time, in France and Spain a movement called 'Graphie Latine' reintroduced the free and sensitive Latin tradition into type design, of which Pascal is a good sample. Unique to Pascal is it's true Italic, completely and truly following the construction of hand written calligraphic letter shapes as usually only seen in serif typefaces.
SULLY JONQUIÈRES (1980-1999).
Sully-Jonquières, designed in 1980, is Mendoza's most original calligraphic type design.
It started as a commission from Henri Jonquières, a French publisher; the prefix 'Sully' was taken from the Hôtel de Sully in Paris, in which the 'Caisse nationale des monuments et des sites historiques' was seated, when the typeface was used for the logo for this French governemental organisation. Sully Jonquières is a real italic typeface that has been put upright; it is the ultimate proof that an italic is all about construction and not about slanting.
For this typeface design, Mendoza was awarded the Prix Maximilien Vox.
FIDELIO (1980-1999).
Fidelio was named after Beethoven's only opera.
It is a chancery italic typeface with swashes that seems to lack a clear systematic organisation: some characters have even more swash versions and some don't have swashes at all. It seems that Fidelio has been written with a broad nibbed pen, but in reality Mendoza designed all shapes meticulously by hand.
More reading about José Mendoza y Almeida and his work can be found in the similarly named book by Martin Majoor and Sébastien Morlighem,
published by Bibliothèque Typographique, 2010, ISBN 978-2-35654-008-9