Fonts in use

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  The relation of content and form might be the number one topic in every discourse about graphic design. The visuals presented in this post provide a very interesting example in this regard.
  
  Jacques Rougerie, born 1945, is a French architect mainly known for his interest in hostile habitats such as the outer space and the deep sea. Inspired by adventure novels like Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and by the groundbreaking diving explorations of Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Rougerie began to conceive underwater architecture in 1973. Under the title Jacques Rougerie – Living with the sea, the Villa Noailles dedicates a comprehensive exhibition to this pioneer architect. The venue is located in the city of Hyères on the French Mediterranean coast and thereby within a stone’s throw of some of the sites where Rougerie realized aquatic projects.
  
  The advertising materials to promote the show build upon drawings, computer renderings, and architectural models that tell a story of technical advance as much as a history of science fiction visualization. Rougerie’s formal language evidently is inspired by nature itself. It’s in this aspect that the typographic choice is so interesting: the main display type used here is Gothic Lab, designed in collaboration between Production Type and Ivan Murit, a specialist in generative design.
  
  Gothic Lab is based on the condensed, monolinear skeleton of Antique Gothic that – coincidentally – shows similarities to the sans-serif used on the title to Jules Verne’s seminal novel around the Nautilus and to the frontispiece with regards to the way in which the stems of the letters are brought to life through special effects. Gothic Lab comes with five different “skins”, patterns inspired by nature and size-specifically generated: Elephant, Croco, Snake, Mantis and Gecko, the latter used here in the LD variant with has less detailing than the HD style.
  
  To draw a conclusion on content and form, both the images and the predominant typeface stem from an exploration of natural forms. As a result, there’s a great feeling of convergence without one part merely mimicking the other.
  
  The other typefaces that complement the main act are Kreuz and Enduro, both by Emmanuel Besse and likewise available from Production Type, and Pangram Pangram’s Agrandir, used to typeset the logo of Villa Noailles.

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  Gothic Lab Gecko LD + Kreuz Extended Regular + Enduro Regular

  Jacques Rougerie – Habiter avec la mer exhibition
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  Hélène Marian together with Doc Levin redesigned the programs issued by the French National Renaissance Museum since 2014. They are all set with a colored (or reversed) Francesco, which turns out to be inspired by types cut in the Renaissance.The typography is very refined: alternates ‘a’ & ‘e’ are used (with open counterforms rather than obstructed ones). So are discretionary ligatures, oldstyle figures and the rarely seen fleurons.See more pictures on the websites of Hélène Marian and Doc Levin.

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  Francesco Regular

  French National Renaissance Museum programs
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  Unabashed Peignot action, on Chambers Street, Tribeca, New York City.The building was erected in 1931. Peignot was released six years later, in 1937. It’s not known when the numbers were installed, but it must have been before 2011.

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  Peignot Black

  Chambers Street 157
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  Nuits sonores (“Sonic Nights”) is the title of a yearly event dedicated to electronic music, visual and performance art that takes place in Lyon, France, in the month of May. It was initiated in 2003 by Arty Farty, a non-profit association whose purpose is to serve youth culture, democratic renewal and public welfare. The event traditionally starts on the Wednesday before Ascension Day – which, in the French calendar, marks the start of the festival season – and lasts five days. Various locations across the city become part of a large parcours, from small galleries in the historic center via the banks of river Rhône to extensive abandoned industrial estates in the outskirts. In 2023 Nuits sonores celebrated twenty years of existence. On that occasion the curators wished to celebrate the jubilee with an exceptional visual identity. They asked Lyon-based studio Superscript², consisting of Patrick Lallemand and Pierre Delmas Bouly, to pick a young emerging talent to collaborate with – and they chose Anthony Couret of Studio Antho, a specialist in creative coding. Together they conceived the basic approach. With around fifty images representative of earlier editions of the event as a source material, they decided to treat these as if they were tiny samples of music. These visual samples were first repeated in order to build up a rhythm, then they were algorithmically dislocated in space to turn them into an oscillating texture, and finally interpolated into a diffusion scheme akin to the visualization tool of a music application. The result is a design principle that will reproduce a recognizable language while each medium might display a different specific outcome of abstract color waves. Apart from the generative code, the designers set on bright red, blue and yellow as colors, a custom-drawn “NS 20” for Nuits Sonores 20 years and on Media Sans as the leading display typeface. As subordinate secondary typeface you will see Suisse Int’l in all caps in some of the pictures in this post. Media Sans is a collection of 42 styles assorted in five families ranging from Extra Condensed to Extended. The common feature is an extremely high x-height that allows for very tight line spacing. The typeface designed by Jean-Baptiste Levée stems from a project for French newspaper Libération. Since 2018 it’s available to the general public from Production Type.

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  Media Sans Black

  Nuits sonores 2023
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  Heimildin (“The Source”) is an Icelandic media company committed to use investigative journalism to provide the public with access to independent information. The firm was founded in 2023 following the merger of Stundar and Kjarnan. It publishes a daily news website and a biweekly printed newspaper that’s also named Heimildin.The new look was conceived by Jón Ingi Stefánsson, co-founder and former design director of Stundar. For the logo/nameplate, Stefánsson chose the Bold weight of Rector. This lapidary serif was designed by Hrvoje Živčić, and won him a Certificate of Typographic Excellence by the TDC. With its sharp details – like the wedge-shaped bars in H and e – Rector perfectly reflects Heimildin’s aspiration to be an incisive voice in Iceland’s media landscape. It’s also used for the logo of the supplement Menning (“Culture”), here starring its sculptural M and the defiant g. Rector is available from Production Type in a family of six weights in roman and italic. There is also Rector Display with Hairline and Outline styles.Main headlines in the print edition often feature Mānuka. This tall, compact sans was designed by Kris Sowersby, taking inspiration from old German poster types. It was released by Klim Type Foundry, alongside Mānuka Slab and an even narrower Mānuka Condensed. The serif used in the newspaper and on the website is Tiempos, by the same type designer and foundry. It appears in two of its three optical sizes, Headline and Text.Heimildin’s font stack is completed by Sanomat Sans by Commercial Type. This typeface was originally designed for another Nordic newspaper, the Finnish Helsingin Sanomat, and is part of a series that also includes Stencil and Slab variants. Heimildin makes use of its Sans Text styles optimized for small sizes.

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  Rector Black

  Heimildin
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  French studio Maison Solide designed this visual identity – and stamps! – for Murs à fleurs, a flower farm in Montreuil (France) that sells seasonal plants.
  
  A funny fact is: the material for the communication of the brand is bringing together the Trabis font, designed by Axel Pelletanche-Thévenart, and the Francesco font, designed by his former teacher, Franck Jalleau – reuniting two generations of typeface designers in one identity.

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  Francesco Regular

  Murs à fleurs visual identity