Margot Lévêque
French type designer, founder of Claude Type. Best known for Romie, a calligraphic serif first released in 2019, now a 12-style family.
Margot Lévêque grew up in Normandy. Her father farms oysters; her mother sells clothes; her sister runs a restaurant. She studied biology in Rennes, found she disliked both the city and the subject, and moved to Paris for marketing and communications. What she kept gravitating to in every course was making the work look good. That thread led her to the École de Communication Visuelle in Paris, where she completed a master’s in art direction and type design[†]It's Nice That — Margot Lévêque.
She started drawing Romie in 2017 because she couldn’t find the Garamond-adjacent serif she was looking for. She drew her own, shared early sketches on Instagram, and got hundreds of requests for the font. She had no release plan and, at that point, barely knew what a font file was.
The request that changed things came from Mark Owens, who was designing The New Black Vanguard, a book by Antwaun Sargent, and emailed asking to buy the typeface. He gave her a month to finish the file; that deadline made Romie a real release. The first version came out in 2019 as a single weight. Over the following years it expanded: a glyph set update and ligature set in 2022, the first italics that December, Light and Black added in May 2023. The complete family arrived in June 2024: six uprights and six true italic companions, mastered and produced by José Solé[†]Fonts in Use — Romie.
A second typeface was circulating before most people knew it existed. In early 2021, Dinamo’s newsletter noted that ABC Marya — a typeface developed in collaboration with Margot, released under Dinamo’s ABC prefix — appeared in Ariana Grande’s remix of 34+35, in the title credits[†]Dinamo Newsletter — February 2021. A Fonts in Use entry documents it in the Onomatopee book In the Name of ♥ from October 2020. Marya has been in use but hasn’t been publicly released[†]Fonts in Use - In the Name of ♥︎ (Onomatopee 192).
Her client work runs through fashion and editorial. She worked as Art Director at Louis Vuitton in Paris and at Pentagram with Paula Scher. Type work has gone to Hermès, Vogue, Prada, Apple, A24, Aperture, Show Studio, Nike, and &Walsh, among others[†]Claude Type — About.
Most of that work goes uncredited. She’s had to fight for it on nearly every job, and most of the time it doesn’t happen. A typeface can take up 70% of a campaign’s visual space, run across billboards in three cities, and still get no credit while the photographer’s name goes on every image. She came to Claude Type, in part, from that frustration.
Claude Type launched in early 2026. The name honors two people: Claude Garamont, the sixteenth-century French punchcutter appointed King’s Type Engraver by Francis I, whose work runs through a lot of her references; and her grandmother Claudine, who taught her what French elegance looks like. When the AI chatbot launched under the same first name, she changed the foundry’s name for almost a year. She changed it back. The tribute, she said, was too sincere to give up, and it’s a French name first[†]The Brand Identity — Margot Lévêque.
The foundry runs on a philosophy she arrived at the hard way. In 2022 she was juggling more than sixty freelance projects alongside her type work. Between 2023 and 2025 she stepped back, moved to Switzerland, had a baby, and cut almost all her contracts. What she came out of that period believing was that typography demands patience, you have to live with a design for a long time, revisit it, question it, and Claude Type is where that belief has a structure around it.
As of January 2026, she’s based between New York and Paris[†]The Brand Identity — Margot Lévêque. Romie, Kalice, and Ninna are in the maison; Ernest is forthcoming.
The Romie page here covers the feature set: the swash alternates in the italic, the OU ligature, and what the stylistic sets actually do. That’s where to go if the typeface is what brought you here.