Nice Shot.

On Duchamp, urinals, and the art of appropriation in type design.

I have always thought of Fontanatype as a personal brand. Anyone who has ever designed a logo for themselves knows how difficult it is to arrive at a final form — I would have changed mine every month if I could. Fontanatype’s more than twenty-year history has been no different.

When Gábor Kóthay and I founded the foundry, the logo reflected where we were: rooted in historical letterforms, revival typefaces, and the archaic aesthetic that defined Central European type culture at the time. It looked like a Renaissance letterpress sign. Fontanatype was Hungary’s first digital type foundry, and over the years, that new digital character gradually made its way into the logo’s evolution, too.

So why a urinal?

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp exhibited a porcelain urinal as a work of art under the title Fountain. That object — displaced, renamed, recontextualized — became one of the most iconic works of the 20th century and a founding gesture of appropriation art. The move was simple and radical: take an existing object, lift it from its original context, and by doing so, make it mean something entirely new.

Type designers have been doing exactly this for centuries. The Phoenicians drew a set of letters that have been copied, adapted, and reinterpreted ever since. Scribes appropriated daily, minute by minute, for generations. We do the same — we take letterforms that already exist, change something, and in doing so, claim them as our own. The urinal and the typeface are closer than they look.

As for the logo itself: I needed a single sign — something recognizable, something that works equally well in print and on screen. Eventually, it became a logo built around a new typeface, Tellur Sans by MONOVO — one that carries its own layer of meaning: tellurium is a semi-metal first discovered by a Transylvanian miner in the 18th century. The slogan lettering is by Gábor. So in our own way, we remain true to the foundry’s original spirit — just with a urinal out front.