CIA GD is the Graphic Design BFA program at Cleveland Institute of Art. Its dedicated website was designed by CIA GD associate professor Adam Swift Lucas. Information about the course is colorfully set over a single page in Charles Mazé’s Axo (Abyme, 2024).

People Love War Data & Travels is the first monograph on the internationally acclaimed French Algerian artist Neïl Beloufa. Love, hatred, war, technology, social unrest, bodies and words in crisis: this is the material of which Beloufa’s work is made. His films, sculptures and multimedia installations audaciously explore how art can address today’s issues, challenging contemporary representations of social relationships, power games, and political and economic structures. An artist favouring collaborations over authorship, and responsive strategies over predetermined intentions, Beloufa has invented his own work methods, and a particular approach to the studio.

The book presents the artist’s projects over the past 12 years, including recent experiments with online platforms and NFTs, taking as its starting point Beloufa’s solo show, Digital Mourning, at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, and offers a non-conformist take on the genre of the monograph, thanks to its playful and inventive book design (After 8 Books).

People Love War Data & Travels was published by After 8 Books (2021) and designed by Olivier Lebrun. It is set in Mercure (Abyme, 2021) and Vevey (Clemens Piontek, 2018).

Parents Must Unite + Fight (or Hackney Flashers: Agitprop, Work, and Socialist Feminism in England) accompanies Camille Richert’s ongoing research on the Hackney Flashers collective, a group of nine activist women who engaged in agitprop from 1974 to 1980 in the working class neighbourhood of Hackney, East London. A book as a tool, part placard, part board, in reference to the activist, artistic and educational practices of the Hackney Flashers. A book to hold and wave, a support for action and learning.

Published by Tombolo Presses, the book was designed by Coline Sunier and Charles Mazé and typeset in Mazé’s Axo (Abyme, 2024).

Three Devils by the Bedside is an exhibition of ten canvases by artist Jeongsu Woo, shown in May–June 2024 at the Art Sonje Center in Seoul, South Korea.

Jeongsu Woo references visual images and narratives from different eras, including illustrations from medieval scriptures and philosophical texts, major works in art history, and characters from fiction and comics. This exhibition begins with Woo’s research on insomnia. Woo came across the story of a medieval knight who suffered from insomnia for years due to three devils at his bedside, only to be miraculously cured when he encountered a monk at Canterbury Cathedral (Art Sonje Center).

The exhibition identity and graphics are designed by Kontaakt, using Persona (Abyme, 2022) and Optima. Small text is set in Routine (English) and AG Choijeongho Minburi (Korean).

Exhibition catalogue for Le Paris de la modernité (1905–1925), held at the Petit Palais, Paris, from November 2023 to April 2024:

From the Belle Époque to the Roaring Twenties, Paris continued, more than ever before, to attract artists from all around the world. This cosmopolitan city was both a capital where innovation thrived and a place of tremendous cultural influence. Paris would maintain this status despite the reorganisation of the international scene following the First World War, a period during which women played a major role, which has too often been forgotten. This exhibition demonstrate the dynamism of the period by highlighting the ruptures and brilliant advances that occurred, both artistic and technological. Through fashion, cinema, photography, painting, sculpture, and drawing, as well as dance, design, architecture, and industry, this exhibition showcases the rich creativity of the period.

The catalogue, published by Paris Musées, is designed by Lisa Sturacci, and set in Persona (Abyme, 2022) and Cardone (205FT, 2021).

The art biennale Anozero’21—22: Meia-Noite was curated by Elfi Turpin and Filipa Oliveira in Coimbra, Portugal. Coline Sunier and Charles Mazé’s visual identity is based on the combination of two symbols, ○ and /, extracted from Anozero’s existing graphic identity to create a continuity with previous editions. In the designers’ hands, ○ becomes a moon ? and its fluctuations ???????? and / becomes the night ////////// and ////////// its ////////// troubles and uncertainties //////////, evoking the biennale’s curatorial project. From abstraction to narrative: from a circle to the moon (or a disco ball?), from shading to twilight.

All communication materials are set in Charles Mazé’s Mercure (Abyme, 2021), Regular, Italic and Transcript. The choice of a serif typeface gives a literary and scientific aspect to the communication – an echo to the Joanina library in Coimbra and its incarnation of western knowledge – and differentiate the design from the past visual identities of Anozero.

Bibliothèque Kandinsky’s Summer University is a cultural programme organised by the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It is built around the source material of modern and contemporary art: archives, written documentation, photographs, films, etc. It gathers young researchers, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, critics, curators, who work together on this material. The Summer University includes writing workshops and archive visits. The result of this research is gathered into a journal, which each year is produced by a different designer.

Issue 8, “Show/Search” (2022) was designed by Olivier Lebrun. It is set in Axo Narrow (Abyme, released 2024), alongside a bespoke version of Lineto’s Biff with Script 12 Pitch and Univers Next.

Les voies du paradis gathers what is left from a lost work: footnotes from a missing text, left by a researcher after his death and edited by Peter Cornell. These notes and their illustrations form an incomplete ensemble, which is to be read through its missing parts. A thread connects the diagrams – images of spirals and labyrinths – that run through and echo the text.

Originally published in Sweden in 1987 under the title Paradisets vägar, Les voies du paradis was republished in 2023 by After 8 Books in Paris. It was designed by Olivier Lebrun and set in Axo Narrow (Abyme, released 2024), Century Schoolbook Monospace and Claude Sans.

Angharad Williams’ Eraser concludes a two-year writing process and has existed in the form of an exhibition, a performance, and a book. It was co-published by After 8 Books, Paris, and the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

From After 8 Books:

Eraser is as much about the categorical boundaries of our consensual reality – between self and other, human and non-human, waking and dreaming consciousness – as it is about an urge to overcome them. The book’s main protagonist undergoes multiple transformations via psychic and physical transferences with elementary forces – involving a trout and a magpie, among other things – that unsettle the idea of the ‘stable’ self. It proposes a perspective in which the categorical distinctions between individual self, others, and non-human life slowly begin to dissolve. Other worlds of consciousness – of animals, plants, and organic matter – here embody a form of social organisation free from the hierarchies of tradition and liberal progress.

The book was designed by Dan Solbach. It is set in Berthe (Abyme, 2018) for the text and Rapid (Source Type, 2022) for the cover.

Sodium collects photographs by Olivier Metzger from his series of images of the night in Soorts-Hossegor, in the Landes region in France, on the Atlantic Ocean coast. It is the first step in a larger photographic study of French night, started at his residency at Troisième Session in May 2022.

Metzger took his photographs between midnight and 4am, guided by the distinct orange glow of sodium bulbs street lighting. As these are slowly replaced by LED lights, our nights are shifting colours. Metzger’s photographs are a survey of these dark hours, of these remaining ‘fireflies’ in the urban space, and an archeology of light.

Sodium is designed by Alice Jauneau and David Vallance and published by Modds. The titles are set in Persona (Abyme, 2022).

Notes from a Fellow Traveller: Mentalism, meaning and thirty years of mistakes is a book for magicians by performer Derren Brown, dealing with performance theory, the process of creating theatrical shows, and on-stage technique.

The book was designed by Callin Mackintosh and published by The Neat Review. It is set in Mercure (Abyme, 2021). It is available in three editions, a paperback, a limited edition hardback (illustrated here), and a boxed deluxed edition.

Narrating the Globe: The Emergence of World Histories of Architecture is a collection of essays from architectural historians from around the world and the first comprehensive examination of the nineteenth-century architectural history survey as a literary genre. The book, to be published in fall 2023 by the MIT Press, is edited by Petra Brouwer, Martin Bressani, and Christopher Drew Armstrong.

From the MIT Press:

The nineteenth century saw the emergence of a new genre of architectural writing: the grand history of world architecture. This genre often expressed a deeply Eurocentric worldview, largely dismissing non-Western architecture through narratives of historical progress and stylistic beauty. Yet even as nineteenth-century historians worked to construct an exclusive architectural canon, they were engaged in constant debate over its categories and constraints. Narrating the Globe traces the emergence of this historical canon, exposing the questions and problems that prompted the canon’s very formation.

Narrating the Globe was designed by Ben Fehrman-Lee and is entirely set in Mercure (Abyme, 2021).

3000000Hz is an artist’s book informed by Olympia Scarry’s solo-exhibition White Noise at Fondazione ICA Milano in 2022, depicting, frame-by-frame, a series of ultrasound scans of white onyx recorded at the Policlinico of Milan.

Words by artist Olympia Scarry:

A record of an archeo echo. 3 million Hertz per second, 5 minutes, and 7 billion years in 2023.
 Ultrasonic frequencies of sound waves, pulsating off the surface of a solid rock of translucent white onyx, submerged in water, sunken again below the sea, recomposing the potential and spatial distances by returning to a deep time, as the membrane of a body. Sound becomes visible as the abstracted, yet anthropomorphic frames translate the traces into a soundtrack of stratigraphic depths. A fluorescent yellow light pierces a fissure, oscillating a horizontal plane as the measure of tempo. The echo’s record of the sublime geological landscape rotating on its own axis, is suspended in time, collapsing the memory of the material, but only for a nanosecond. Sound travels faster underwater.

3000000Hz was conceived by the artist, designed by Dan Solbach and produced by Apalazzo Gallery and Fondazione ICA Milano. The text is set in Persona (Abyme, 2022).

Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty was published at the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met), New York, shown from 5 May to 16 July 2023.

From The Met:

The book, the first complete investigation into Lagerfeld’s (1933–2019) artistry, explores his extraordinary sixty-five year career, from the designs for Chloé and Fendi in the 1960s and 1970s to his celebrated leadership in the 1980s and beyond at Chanel and with his own label. Inspired by the ‘line of beauty’ theorised by eighteenth-century English painter William Hogarth, this publication pursues the straight and serpentine ‘lines’ and their intersections in Lagerfeld’s work as a means of understanding his unique creative process.

Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty was designed by OK-RM and is entirely typeset in Mercure (Abyme, 2021). The typeface is also used for the exhibition graphics and communication materials, designed by the museum's in-house team, as well as for the Met Gala 2023, which celebrated Lagerfeld’s legacy and the opening of the exhibition.

Installation views of A Written Exhibition: Agustina Bessa-Luís and the Serralves Collection, curated by Ricardo Nicolau and António Preto and held at Fundação de Serralves – Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, between October 15, 2022 and April 16, 2023.

The exhibition was thought of as a three-dimensional book. The horizontal axis divides the texts into Portuguese and English. The texts appear at the same height in each language and spread on the ‘page’. The column width is proportional to the width of the walls, relating too to the width of the work. As the curators put it ‘the aim is to create reverberations, unexpected synapses, between the words and the selected pieces, expanding their respective meanings and possible interpretations’. (Márcia Novais)

The exhibition graphics were designed by Márcia Novais and typeset in Mercure (Abyme, 2021), paired with ABC Monument Grotesk (Dinamo, 2018) for headings.

Kertész – Lartigue. Un pas de côté is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at Espace Richaud, Versailles in 2023. It is published by Bernard Chaveau Édition with the city of Versailles and the Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie.

This book presents a selection of photographs by two pioneers of modern photography. Jacques Henri Lartigue and André Kertész each built their own work, following parallel or divergent paths, but systematically on the fringes of the major trends. Neither journalist, nor documentary filmmaker, nor actor of the event, each gave his photographs a timeless dimension that explains the ever-renewed interest of the spectators (Bernard Chaveau).

Kertész – Lartigue was designed by Clémence Michon and typeset in Persona (Abyme, 2022) and Louize Display (205TF, 2013).

The Wrong Man is an artist book by Liza Lacroix, published by Ligature Press in 2022. The 32-page oversized book (15 × 11 ⅜ in) only includes 13 images, each tipped in, complemented by rough edges and a glassine jacket. The publisher explains how publishing this book began with a get-together:

The first time I met Liza Lacroix she showed me a poorly photocopied still of Jim Carrey leering in The Mask and we talked about how we talk about art. She showed me a telephoto, paparazzi shot of a flabby, pasty Jack Nicholson gesticulating wildly on a pleasure boat. A wooly iPhone snap of a Baselitz painting reproduced in a book balanced on her lap. No doubt, there was a “right” way to go about explaining all of this. After doing it for a while, it becomes like a parlor trick. Pick a theory out of the deck. It turned out what we were both interested in was something else. An exegesis that could match the wrongness of these images and the weird, irrepressible feelings that brought us to them.

The Wrong Man was designed by Studio Mathias Clottu and typeset in Berthe (Abyme, 2018). Book photography by Lewis Ronald.

Set in the rave scene of 90s Berlin, Last Utopia sketches the emotional landscape of an era that was supposed to be liberated, a time when the future was ostentatiously hailed. Yet in between the markers of optimism and progress, the first cracks announcing the permanent crises of today are revealed. Understanding techno as narrative device, this short novella traces echoes of utopian imaginary (Jan Van Eyck Academie).

Last Utopia contains a chapter (in English and Dutch) of Persis Bekkering’s novel Exces (Prometheus, 2021), which she had been working on during her stay at the Jan Van Eyck Academie. The book was designed by fellow resident Martin Groch, using English Egyptian (Abyme, 2017) for the cover and Media for the text.

Martin Groch also produced a series of visuals using English Egyptian to promote Bekkering’s Last Utopia podcast, which deals with rave culture and its utopian potential.

Since 1994, the Cnap (Centre national des arts plastiques) is actively supporting graphic design in France, organising public projects and promoting research in the field. Each year, it publishes Graphisme en France, a journal that includes essays around a theme and the calendar of the year’s exhibitions and events. The design is entrusted to young designers who recently graduated from a French school: format, materials, binding and typefaces are left to them, which results in every issue being different from the previous one.

The theme of Graphisme en France 2022, the 28th issue, is ‘Creation, tools, research’ and follows in the footsteps of the 2012 issue, titled ‘Code, tools, design’, revisiting similar questions after ten years through three essays. Julie Blanc and Nolwenn Maudet write about the changes that happened in this period, and about their own relation to tools. Anne-Lyse Renon, who leads a project around Jacques Bertin, compiles an overview of design research in France. Joost Grotens talk about his own design and research projects which use or hijack digital tools.

Graphisme en France 2022 was designed by F451 (Quentin Creuzet, Domitille Debret and Simon Bouvier) in collaboration with Fanny Hamelin and Antoine Elsensohn. In line with this year’s theme, each section of the book was produced with a different tool: Adobe InDesign, Paged.js, LibreOffice Write, Microsoft Excel, and HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript ES6. It is entirely set in Mercure (Abyme, 2021).

Graphisme en France 2022 is distributed through the French cultural network, on request, and is also available for download.

Nocturnal scenes, in the city or in nature, humans and animals, the profound intensity of Xinyi Cheng’s subjects is striking within paintings which transcend their apparent softness and simplicity (Lafayette Anticipations).

Seen Through Others is the first institutional solo exhibition of Cheng’s work in France, curated by Christina Li. It was shown at Lafayette Anticipations between March and May 2022, presenting a broad selection of her work spread across the whole building.

The square catalogue accompanying the exhibition includes several essays alongside reproductions of Cheng’s paintings, and five previously unpublished photographs as postcards. It was designed by Charles Villa and is typeset in Mercure (Abyme, 2021), alongside Aperçu Mono (Colophon, 2012) for the captions.