ABOUT 
ARTHUR SCHWARZ

Arthur Schwarz is the co-founder of the independent type foundry Bolid System, together with Maël Bächtold. They create typefaces ranging from bold displays to extensive text families, always crafted with precision, purpose and care. They see type as a material that shapes how ideas are seen, read and understood.

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Our work spans a wide range of fields, including fashion, art, culture, editorial, watchmaking, theme parks, technology, industry, sport and institutional or non-profit organizations.

SELECTED CLIENTS

Type Foundries ↓
Production Type, Extraset, Type of Feeling, LO-OL, Sociotype, APK Type, Blaze Type, Fontef.

Design Studios ↓
&Walsh, Neo Neo, Alex Dujet Type System Corp (Futur Neue), Cécile + Roger, Enen Studio, Peter Korsman (Autograph), Hugmun, Margot Lévêque. 

Brands & Institutions ↓
Vogue, Bosch, Humane, Swiss Olympic, CoreMedica, Crack Magazine, Geneva Conservatory of Music.

TALKS & LECTURES

• Everything old is new again. (In Design We Trust 8 by ADC Paris, 2024)
• The font business is broken: can we fix it? (ATypI 2023, Paris)
• Business of Type: Type of Business. (In Design We Trust 6 by ADC, Paris, 2022)
• How to type design (Design Society Talk, Plymouth, UK, 2022)

PUBLICATIONS

• Typodarium (Verlag Hermann Schmidt, 2026)
• Young Graphic Design Switzerland! (Museum für Gestaltung Zürich 2025)
• Typodarium (Verlag Hermann Schmidt, 2025)
• Typodarium (Verlag Hermann Schmidt, 2024)
• Typodarium (Verlag Hermann Schmidt, 2023)
• Typodarium (Verlag Hermann Schmidt, 2022)
• BASE 10 (Melbourne, Australia, 2021)
• Tomorrow Type Today (Russia, 2020)
• Catálogo Tipográfico 2020 (Spain, 2020)
• New Aesthetics 2 (Germany, 2020)
• Graphic Matters Festival (Breda, NL, 2017)
• Weltformat Festival (Lucerne, Switzerland, 2017)

BIO

Schwarz developed an interest in type design early in his design practice. He began his studies at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD) in 2015 and graduated with a Bachelor’s degree with honors in 2018. His diploma project, created in collaboration with Maël Bächtold, was a variable font named Bolid, inspired by car racing and speed. Schwarz pursued further studies at École cantonale d'art de Lausanne (ÉCAL), where he graduated in 2020 with a Master’s degree in Type Design. His master's project was a compendium of three fonts, two scripts and one sans-serif.

While interning at the creative agency &Walsh in New York, he worked on type design and font art direction. After completing his master’s degree, he interned at Extraset Type Foundry, where he developed the ES Build typeface, drawing inspiration from Herbert Bayer’s research on a universal typeface. Between 2020 and 2022, Schwarz in collaboration with Xavier Erni from Neo Neo designed ES Dokument, a type superfamily consisting of 60 styles. This typeface is characterized by its inspiration from the curves of various early 20th-century German industrial grotesques.

In 2021, Schwarz joined Production Type as a designer and later as Communications Manager. In 2022, he delivered a lecture titled “Business of Type: Type of Business” at IDWT 2022 in Paris, where he discussed the creative freedom that typography can offer to branding projects. The following year, in 2023, he presented “The Font Business is Broken: Can We Fix It?” at ATypI 2023, addressing issues surrounding font licensing, misconceptions, and unenforceable clauses found in the end-user license agreements (EULAs) of multiple type foundries. For his second lecture at the yearly IDWT, Schwarz delivered a presentation entitled “Everything Old Is New Again.” about legacy design standards and their translation into the typographical environment.

Schwarz co-founded with Maël Bächtold in 2025, the independant type foundry Bolid System.