Ciseaux Matisse was inspired by the exhibition Drawing With Scissors, which I visited at the Kunsthalle Schirn in my hometown of Frankfurt am Main in 2003, and the book Jazz, published in 1947 by Henri Matisse.

Admittedly, before that time, I wasn’t a fan of Matisse’s work, neither his late nor early work. That definitely changed after the exhibition. While his motifs have been overused on postcards and mousepads, you forget those tiny pictures in front of the originals. Some of the works were massive—larger than 24ft. By cutting directly into the color, Matisse created shapes with strong dynamics.

Years later, in 2007, I used that inspiration to cut an exclusive font for a newspaper that I designed at that time:

Later I developed that font into the four styles featured here.

The cut-out style is a paper cutout; boxed is the paper background. Both linear and boxed linear have no curved outlines, so they are more aggressive.

As drawing with scissors implies, all characters are cut by hand. With only uppercase letters, this font is designed for editorial use: headlines, slogans in ads, or musical usage in posters and flyers that need the little touch of the jazz scissors.

In special cases, the lowercase letters contain alternate shapes to the uppercase forms.

The font family comes with four styles: cut out, cut out linear, boxed, and boxed linear.

Individually hand-cut letters for a unique look
Family with four styles
Comes in OpenType (Postscript)
Works on all Mac OS Versions
Works on all Windows Versions
iPhone / iPad installer included
Ornaments
Free updates
Immediate download


Get all four styles now: cut out, cut out linear, boxed and boxed linear.

The Fonts work on all Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, as well as mobile devices like iPhones and iPads.

If you are purchasing on behalf of a company, please select the size of your company (number of employees in total). For larger companies, please select multiples of 100 employees tier.

By purchasing this font you agree to Harald Geisler’s End User License Agreement (EULA), which can be viewed here.