PPZZ.lu
a manifesto, written sideways.
We are a studio of typographic research seated in a former tram-depot in Luxembourg-Ville, where the floor still smells faintly of grease and the windows are taller than any practical purpose required.
We believe a page is an architecture, that a letterform is a small building, and that the act of reading is the act of walking through a room made of ink. We arrange our rooms in long galleries and we ask the visitor to walk.
“Vertical is the default of the elevator. We prefer the corridor — one floor, many doors, each opened in sequence.”
We are interested in things that are wider than they are tall: friezes, banners, awnings, the great horizon, the slow horizontal pull of a freight train. The screen is no longer a portrait orientation pretending to be a stack of pages; it is a window into a much longer room.
We make posters, books, type specimens, kinetic identities, exhibition signage, and the occasional commemorative tea-towel. We have never made a vertical homepage, and we do not plan to start.
“Read this sentence as if you were dragging a finger along the lip of a long table. Slowly. Without losing your place.”
Our practice is a small one, deliberately. Two principals, three apprentices, one cat called Linotype who patrols the press at night. We work in Lëtzebuergesch, French, German, and English, in roughly equal measure, often in the same sentence.
Plinth, a display family of seven weights.
A geometric display family commissioned by Casino Luxembourg for the 2025 season of exhibitions. The face is built on a 12-unit grid and exists in seven weights, from Hairline to Megalith, all designed to be readable at scale — from the cuff of a sleeve to the side of a building.
A ruler that measures in ems & rivers.
A limited-edition brass ruler etched with typographic measurements — the em, the en, the cicero, the pica, the river-width — produced in collaboration with the Atelier Weyer of Echternach. 240 numbered copies, each weighed by hand on a scale that hasn't been recalibrated since 1937.
Catalogue for a press that refused to retire.
A 384-page catalogue raisonné for an 1893 Heidelberg cylinder press still in working order at the National Library's annexe. The book is the press's autobiography, set in its own metal type, printed by itself, with marginal notes contributed by the four operators who have known it since 1962.
A kinetic identity for the Mudam.
A motion identity built on the same geometry as our display family Plinth. The mark behaves like a typewriter: each campaign types in its own subtitle at 80ms per character, the carriage returns audibly at the end of each line, and the slug locks into place with a faint mechanical thud.
A book bound under 12 tonnes of polite pressure.
Our annual studio almanac, hand-bound in our basement bindery on a 1928 Karl Krause cast-iron press inherited from the Kremer family. 320 numbered copies, each carrying a thumbprint somewhere on the endpaper. We will not tell you where.
Specimens, pinned to a long horizontal shelf.
OPQRSTUVWXYZ
Colophon · thank you for walking the corridor.
PPZZ.lu — Studio fir typografesch Forschung. A two-principal practice in Luxembourg-Ville, founded 2020.
19, rue du Dépôt
L-2549 Luxembourg
by appointment, mostly
Set in Space Grotesk & Fraunces. Built sideways, panel by panel, on a quiet weekend in May. The corridor is approximately 1100 viewports long.