The Saisons Culturelles poster

Following the creation of the town of Chaumont’s visual identity, the Baldinger•Vu-Huu studio team started work on the sub-identity for Chaumont’s Cultural Seasons. The city of Chaumont boasts a rich cultural programme. As well as being the city of graphic design, it also wants to showcase the city’s cultural offering. To this end, eight years ago, they launched the “Saisons Culturelles”, supported by a newspaper, a website and posters, which are renewed every year.

It was necessary to create a sub-identity, with a visual link to the main identity in order to clearly identify the sender, but at the same time distinct from it in order to be recognized as something special. To achieve this, the Baldinger•Vu-Huu studio used Dina Chaumont, the typeface family they created for the city of Chaumont, and designed new pictograms, abstract shapes that are freer and more organic. On top of that, they played with a bright and bold color palette.

The Saisons Culturelles newspaper

The Saisons Culturelles newspaper

The Saisons Culturelles newspaper

The Saisons Culturelles newspaper

The Saisons Culturelles newspaper

The Saisons Culturelles website

In 2009, contemporary artist Édouard Sautai did a one-year residency at the Forum du Blanc-Mesnil, France. This book, published on this occasion, retraces his experimentations and documents his residency. Baldinger•Vu-Huu was asked to design this graphic transcription.

Book designed in 2022-2023 by studio Baldinger•Vu-Huu, using exclusively BVH Baldinger, in Regular and Bold weights. This 304-page book brings together French and English texts.

From the publisher’s website (translated from the French):

This first monograph devoted to Joseph Dadoune’s work from 1996 to 2021 takes a detailed look at the artist’s output, with essays by Drorit Gur Arie, Marie-Laure Bernadac, Donatien Grau, Doron von Beider and Lucia Sagradini. Joseph Dadoune’s multifaceted and complex practice is revealed in ways that interweave performance, architecture, installation, video, photography, drawing, painting and sound. His work is shaped by multiple questions, ranging from intimate to political, from the individual’s body to the social body, and addressing issues of exile, gender and identity. Two key elements are at play: the utopian dimension of art and its relationship to a territory (the Ofakim desert) that evokes the tensions between East and West, central power and periphery, as well as colonial issues. With his paintings, he attempts to answer the questions that run through his mind: what is there beyond the image? Behind the image? Behind the black box? It’s a return to the essence of painting (a surface and a frame), to the anonymity of a Peter Schwarze who reveals himself behind the tutelary figure of Blinky Palermo.

On the 14th of June 2023, bvh type hosted an event at Floréal Belleville in Paris with the entire team to celebrate the launch of our type foundry and the unveiling of our latest major project: the new visual identity for the city of Chaumont, for which we created a complete type family, Dina Chaumont Text and Dina Chaumont Display.

To mark the occasion, we designed a range of goodies, postcards, stickers, tote bags and silkscreen posters using Dina Chaumont Display and BVH BDot. We took possession of the venue by printing type on A4 and A3 and pinning it up everywhere. Every 15 minutes, the text display on the large yellow wall was changed, line by line, as an evolving implementation of the typeface. We also displayed A4 compositions in the window, playing with the pictograms.

In the basement, bvh type showed an animation of Dina Chaumont Display explaining herself. This short film – created by Bettina Comte, with original music by Hugues Sanchez – was followed by the making of the project and an animation showing the evolution of research into the letter a and the A4 mascot.

The LaM is the first museum to bring together three collections: modern art, contemporary art and outsider art (art brut) in one place. It questions art history, offers perspectives that allow new off-track investigations, and encourages dialogue between works and periods. Through more than 7,000 works, it provides an exceptional panorama of the art of the 20th and 21st centuries. The compartmentalisation of categories is replaced by a fruitful perspective. The museum, located in a park, is open to the surrounding nature, where the collection continues to be displayed. In 2022 the baldinger•vu-huu studio won the competition to redesign the visual identity and signage of the LaM museum located in Villeneuve d'Ascq, France.

A cultural institution such as the LaM must be identified by the typeface with which it communicates, which is why it is a key element in this project. It carries the DNA of the graphic concept. b•v-h type proposes a singular typography that reflects the museum’s openness, the contemporary and original aspects while being strongly identifiable.

As a companion to BVH Eddi, the accompanying typeface, the identity typeface – BVH Eddi Line – is a custom refined outlined version of Eddi, allowing for openings that welcome content, and allowing the eye to wander in and out of the letters. This title typeface works perfectly with the BVH Eddi as it takes on its height, characteristics, silhouette and proportions.

The typeface consists of two parts: a black outline, and a solid part that can either take on different colors or remain blank. The outline style allows text to be composed over images while remaining readible and standing out from the background. When used without an interior colour, the outline version creates a vibration that attracts the eye and sets a particular pace.

A special pastille has been designed for the 40th anniversary of the LaM. The star-shaped sign represents the intersection, meeting, and festive moment that this anniversary means. This graphic element, used as an emblem, also represents openness and influence on the territory and can be adapted in a playful way to different formats.

In 2021, Baldinger•Vu-Huu created a book for La Samaritaine, an iconic Parisian department store that has been closed for 16 years and finally reopened in 2021 after a complete renovation. To celebrate the reopening, the studio designed the book giving an inside view of its history, renovation, and reopening. They used BVH Bart Display and Text, itself designed starting from historical sources and then emancipating itself from them to find its unique expression.

In 2017 architecture cabinet Vincent Parreira was commissioned to renovate the hall of Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine in the Palais de Chaillot in Paris.

They asked graphic design studio Baldinger•Vu-Huu to design the hall signage and furniture. The idea was to bring the feeling of big cities and their emblematic centres and crossroads into the building. The vertical signage is inspired by vertical shop signs and is all visible from the centre of the entry hall, inviting visitors to discover the different parts of the building. They used BVH Newut for the signs, playing with the use of uppercase mixed with lowercase.

Baldinger•Vu-Huu designed and produced the signage for the Manufacture des Œillets in Ivry, France. This place, a former factory of eyelets, gathers a theatre, an art school as well as a center of contemporary art.

The wayfinding project was realized with the BVH Anto Rounded, reminding of the elastics used in the signage supports.

In 2009, Baldinger•Vu-Huu designed the new visual identity of École Estienne (École Supérieure des Arts et des Industries Graphiques). The school combines tradition and innovation. The uppercase É represents the school, its dynamism, its contemporaneity. The lowercase e represents Estienne, the founder of the school and therefore the tradition. The line links these two worlds in an inseparable way. It symbolizes the transfer of knowhow into our modern world. The school, in its modernity, remains connected to history. The line is elastic, it has a minimal length and can be stretched according to the desires and needs. The historical heritage thus becomes an asset in a resolutely dynamic identity.

Catalogue designed in 2022 by studio Baldinger•Vu-Huu, on the occasion of the exhibition Blancs by Yosef Joseph Yaakov Dadoune at Galerie Éva Vautier in Nice, France. This exhibition is centered around his white paintings.

Faire écran (extract), Barbara Wolffer:

In his Parisian studio, far from the light of the Mediterranean shores, Joseph Dadoune has written a new page in his artistic practice. One might be tempted to say a blank page, so much so that white occupies a significant place in the works of his new series entitled White screen, without precedent in his career. After black, yellow, and intense colours, here comes the irruption of white. Its brilliance, its power, its nuances, its opacity, its blinding character too. One would be tempted to say that for Joseph Dadoune, it is a question of creating a screen. Veiled windows, blank frames, buried screens, opaque mirrors, blind walls, covered or glimpsed objects: in these works, in fact, the gaze is stopped, the image or the object hidden, absent, crossed out, impossible even. The artist endeavours to cover, mask, veil, bury.

This 86-page book brings together French, English, Hebrew and Japanese texts. Text in the first two languages is set in BVH Anto Rounded, while IBM Plex Mono serves for the others.

Initiated by the artist Louis Verret during the spring 2020 lockdown, aussi: is a project combining aquarelle paintings and poetry. The artist first chose books that were dear to him, that accompanied his travels, wanderings, encounters, and discussions with friends… He then painted them in watercolour, each on a different monochrome background, and accompanied each of these images with a text recounting his memories linked to that book. These texts are not simple descriptions or summaries of the books but personal memories of the artist, who anchors his readings in his memory thanks to an intimate temporality, which only he knows and shares with us in this work. Every aquarelle is associated with a poem, his memory, linked to the previous one by a hyphen: “aussi:” (“also:”).

Since the beginning of 2021, excerpts from the corpus have been presented in the solo shows Pizza Hut Saturday night (Sunday morning, too) and Without freedom at the Karl Marx Studio, in the group exhibitions Narrations of the ordinary, Borderline at the Pavillon Vendôme in Clichy, L’écume des songes, DDessin 21.

The artist contacted the Baldinger•Vu-Huu studio to design a book containing each of the 125 watercolours and their poems. They were inspired by the artist’s poems which they reinterpreted. We chose BVH Anto Rounded to compose this book. Typographically, “aussi:” is found throughout the book, introducing most of the paragraphs.

This mirror-covered booklet was published in 2021, on the occasion of Laura Lamiel’s exhibition in Basel, in the new space opened by Cahn Contemporary. Confronted with the brutalist architecture of Cahn’s new space in Basel, French artist Laura Lamiel proposes installations that capture us entirely by their scale, their colours, and their reflective properties.

This booklet was designed by Baldinger•Vu-Huu, using their brand new BVH Bart Text and BVH Bart Display. It contains essays and reflections on the works presented in the exhibition. Published with the support of the CNAP (Centre National des Arts Plastiques).

Since 2018, graphic design studio Baldinger•Vu-Huu and Points Communs have bound a close partnership for the conception and evolution of their visual identity. Points Communs is a venue for the creation and dissemination of live arts. The place welcomes theater, music, dance, circus, participative projects… It was thus necessary to feel this multiplicity in the visual identity. The studio set up a graphic system, a typography and a very particular illustration style. The BVH Anto family, created on this occasion, finally found its place in the foundry catalog. Since 2018, Baldinger•Vu-Huu regularly produces printed materials, posters, seasonal catalogs, invitations, flyers.

Since 2014, Swiss architecture cabinet Metron and graphic designers Baldinger•Vu-Huu have worked jointly to develop Metron’s identity. They chose the reliability and rigor of BVH Baldinger to embody the values of their cabinet. Baldinger•Vu-Huu designed the logo and lay out their annual activity report.

In 2022, graphic design studio Baldinger•Vu-Huu designed the identity for Cactus Moon Studio, using BVH Eddi Heavy. It is paired with Arial on the website.

Cactus Moon Studio is a new company specialized in the production of limited-edition artworks and art publications, run by Taymour Grahne. They produce, publish, and present limited edition prints, objects, furniture and books. Named after the moon cactus, they aim to act as a supportive platform, offering access to on-the-up artists, and everything a new collector needs to flourish. The moon cactus is a magical hybrid of two separate plants - the dragon fruit base of water, nutrients and life; and the bud which blooms for a short but vibrant period of time. The principle of this identity is based on the visual aspect of these cacti.

This series of two booklets was created at the request of the French architect Anne Françoise Jumeau, by the graphic design studio Baldinger•Vu-Huu in 2020. Each of these publications aims to explain a particular point of the architect’s practice, illustrated by the buildings thought, designed and conceived by the agency.

In 2014, Baldinger•Vu-Huu designed the visual identity of the Frac Île-de-France, a regional contemporary art fund, spread over three locations. The multi-site aspect of the Frac was one of the main issues. The arrows evoke the different exhibition places and the notion of off-field when they adapt to the limits of a format. For this identity, Baldinger•Vu-Huu worked with BVH Eiffel, which is the Frac’s typeface until now. Since 2014, the Frac identity has been featured in various media and applications: from website and signage to exhibitions, posters, flyers, exhibition books and so on.

L’ahah is a non-profit organisation supporting contemporary creation and the research in arts. It offers tailor-made and long-term collaborations with the plastic artists. The association asked Baldinger•Vu-Huu to design its visual identity, which is applied on their website as well as on their exhibition flyers or their social networks.

In 2015, the Paris City Hall worked jointly with graphic design studio Baldinger•Vu-Huu to create the Paris Culture program. This program, which became a poster, brings together all the cultural programming of the year 2015-2016 in Paris. They used the BVH BLine, as well as a custom stencil version of this typeface.

The Obliques evening was organized on the occasion of the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation concert held at the Opéra Comique in Paris in April 2019. It was an event in tribute to the practice of choral singing in all its richness and diversity.

The graphic design studio Baldinger•Vu-Huu created the visual identity of the evening, producing the program, the invitations, the posters and the signage. The dressing of the singers and the scenography of the stage was designed by French contemporary artist Xavier Veilhan.