Posters and publication for a two days masterclass about typeface and writing between France and Germany at ÉSAD Amiens. The idea of the poster is to graphically express and explore a tension between fastness and stiffness of a gesture. And in the lines, you can read HAND and TOOL.

Simon Renaud was responsible for the graphic design of the posters and the publication. He used his own typeface Augure, distributed by 205TF.

We were there for your first cry. Hear ours.

Adèle Fontaine's thesis for her DNSEP Diploma at ÉSAD Amiens in France. With a feminist focus, she researched and wrote about what it socially and politically represent to be a midwife in France. Here is a short text she wrote to present her work:

At the root of this memoir is an essential figure in my life, my own mother; but above all, there's her profession, little known yet essential to life. She is a midwife. It all began with a collection of images. We had to dig out the archives: open the drawers of over forty years' work, unearth the pink smock that had been sleeping in a cupboard, find the photo album in the attic. In this heap of memories, there was this snapshot of her at the age of six, a plastic stethoscope around her neck and a baby in her arms. The question then arose: where did this vocation come from?

This memoir brings together several generations of women around the theme of the body. From the first drop of blood to the screams of childbirth, women endure a reluctant hold on their bodies. As for the midwife, she navigates between these experiences. She comes up against a medical world deaf to her demands. A feminist figure, attached to the medical world, she is at the heart of the struggles of our time. The sphere of intimacy meets that of militancy. A complex question emerges: how can women's bodies in the medical system become a political and feminist issue?

208 pages, 13,7×19,6 cm. See more on Adele’s website and her Instagram.

Cover for the 2024 festival program with art by İnci Eviner

”I call ‘Whole-World’ our universe such as it changes and endures through exchange…” This line by Martiniquan poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) was chosen by the Maison de la Culture Amiens as the guiding star of a festival held annually since 2019. The term Whole-World (Tout-monde) can be understood in correspondence to Glissant’s concept of multicultural creolization in which all individuals and societies can profit from cultural exchange, leading to completely new, otherwise nonexistent cultural phenomena.

The Maison de la Culture Amiens (MCA) is the major cultural hub of that Northern-French city. It is a multi-partite house showcasing exhibitions, theater, dance, cinema and many other forms of visual and performative arts. In earlier posts we presented Julien Lelièvre’s redesign of MCA’s visual identity and his work on program brochures and advertising material.

While these are usually very colorful, Lelièvre takes a whole different approach in the design for the Festival Amiens Tout-monde. It is exclusively black and white and uses a single typeface collection: Cardinal from Production Type. Cardinal Classic is a roman of normal width but available in three different variations with regard to the length of its ascenders and descenders. Cardinal Classic Short is in use here for all reading texts. On the headline level you can see Cardinal Fruit in different weights. This branch boasts condensed proportions and an expressive italic.

In some way this reduced design concept seems to counteract the spirit of the festival whose aim it is to bring artists from around the world together and in touch with the local scene. At a second look, the omission of color can be read as an invitation to discover the actual event in full color in person. The reduction also offers a stage for the different artists and illustrators that were invited over the years to spark the crowd’s curiosity.

2024 festival teaser clip

Spread from the 2024 festival program

Spread from the 2024 festival program

Cover for the 2023 festival program with illustration Louise Druelle alias Loup Blaster

Announcement of the 2023 festival

Cover for the 2022 festival program with art by Amélie Fontaine

2022 festival teaser clip

2021 festival poster with art by Elsa Abderhamani

2020 festival poster with illustration by Zeina Abirached

Cover and back cover of the 2019 festival program with illustrations by Edmond Baudoin

Spread from the 2019 festival program

Spread from the 2019 festival program

One of the advantages of working with interesting and diverse type families is that you have a lot to choose from when you work on the same job for a couple of years. This is the case with the project featured in this post. It shows some of the promotional material for the MCA, the Maison de la Culture of Amiens in the north of France. It’s the city’s major cultural hub and a multi-partite house with an extensive program. We featured Julien Lelièvre’s redesign of the institution’s visuality as introduced in the 2018/19 season in a previous post, and have been following him over the years in order to see his ever new takes on the topic.

For the season of 2022/23, Lelièvre chose the heart as a guiding star and turned the Maison de la Culture into everyone’s home, by the French figure of speech “À la Maison”. The welcoming banners already reveal central aspects of the graphic design: clear, rectangular fields of bright colors, partly overlaid, and the typeface PVC Menu as this season’s darling. It appears in all the headlines and big reading texts. Apart from it you can see PVC Banner Ultra in MCA’s logotype and Media Sans for the smaller reading text in the program booklet. All of these typefaces were published by Production Type.

Currently, PVC is a famille nombreuse of seven, but its designer Hélène Marian is still extending it. PVC Menu is a sans serif of condensed proportions. Marian describes it as her personal take on a typical French brush lettering style which, in the 1960s, materialized in Roger Excoffon’s notorious Antique Olive. This kinship becomes evident in the vertical stroke endings, among other details. PVC Menu may be the least extreme in the family – it’s hard not to be overlooked when all your siblings are extroverts. In this season, Julien Lelièvre points us to its discrete charms, revealing that PVC Menu has a lot of personality in its own right.

The Maison de la Culture of Amiens (MCA) is the major hub for cultural events in this northern French city. MCA’s visual identity is being created by graphic designer Julien Lelièvre in collaboration with Bureau Jigsaw and type designer Jean-Baptiste Levée from Production Type. We previously showed the new visual identity that was introduced in 2018, and the iterations of the following years. This post is concerned with some of the items designed by Lelièvre for the 2021/22 season.

PVC Banner is an ultrawide sans that serves for the institution’s logotype. Together with PVC Promo and PVC Menu, it layed the foundation of the PVC family, a heterogeneous type series continually created by Hélène Marian. PVC Menu is her personal take on typical French brush lettering styles. Marian intended it as the family’s go-to style: it’s the least eccentric and most versatile one. We get to see Menu again for the 2021/22 season, where it’s used for headlines and banner text. The spiky PVC Dynasty – which debuted in the 2019/20 season – takes a break.

Instead, new this year is PVC Express. Developed out of Marian’s own sign-painting practice and specifically evolving from gift tag lettering, PVC Express translates the quick strokes made with a beveled marker into a digital font. Swift loopy gestures – a typical feat of the trade – are preserved in this aptly named style. Amidst the diverse styles, Express stands out as the most expressive and hand-like. At the same time, it integrates with its siblings through a shared x-height. To Marian, it was important to maintain the underlying PVC spirit: “not to mime or caricature the hand, but to show a typographic and digital response to questions raised by hand.”

PVC Express can be seen in use for the sweeping numbers on the posters and the giant banner on MCA’s façade. Inside the season booklets, it appears with its dynamic lowercase including the almost circular s, the looping i dot, and the attached accents. Other spreads feature its uppercase characters in extralarge sizes, allowing a closer look at the letterform construction and the stroke modulation.

Since September 2023, PVC Express is available for licensing from Production Type. Read more about the PVC family and its various members in a dedicated article.

PVC Express in mixed case

Back and front cover of the season booklet, with numerals from PVC Express

Interior spread with headline in PVC Menu and copy in the yet unreleased Text version of Media Sans

Interior spread. Page numbers and category names are set in PVC Banner

All-caps PVC Express with gradient fill

Season posters in the entrance hall

PVC Express and PVC Menu for the banner above the entrance. The logo in the bottom left corner is in PVC Banner.

The Maison de la Culture of Amiens, France, is the main cultural hub of that city for all sorts of events, from exhibitions to dance and drama. Julien Lelièvre is the graphic designer who, back in 2018, developed a new house style for this institution. Ever since he finds exciting and surprising derivations of the central theme for each season. This post is dedicated to the visual communication of the 2020/2021 season.

The cover variants of the program booklet play with the stark contrast of plain yellow and red, colors associated with danger, heat and action. The only graphic elements used are the Maison de la Culture logotype and the figures “2021”, both set in PVC Banner Ultra designed by Hélène Marian and published by Production Type. The typeface was developed with exactly this kind of use in mind: to maximally fill up the horizontal space.

Looking inside the brochure we see the way the pictures participate in the game of yellow and red: their lower half is systematically altered to a duotone look. The dividing spread “Hiver” uses a blury photograph, overdrawn with a digitally generated pattern, red on yellow.

In addition to PVC Banner, PVC Menu is used in the brochure as a titling face and the yet to be released Text version of Media Sans by Jean-Baptiste Levée in its Regular and Bold cuts for the longer reads.

Program booklet for September–December 2020, front and back cover

Program booklet for January–June 2021, front and back cover

Spread from the program booklet, with PVC Menu for headlines and Media Sans Text for the copy

Spread from the program booklet. PVC Banner is used for the page number and running title (“Danse”).

Spread from the program booklet, with PVC Banner Bold for “Hiver”

Cover of the advance program. The map marker reading “avec vous” (“with you”) features caps from Signal.

“Ouvert” – the MCA is open. The booklet with the program for spring/summer 2021 brought a change of colors, to blue and yellow.

Page from the interior with Incandescences, a play by Ahmed Madani

Page from the interior with Thélonius & Lola, a play for the whole family, staged by Zabou Breitman

In 2007, an exhibition in three parts was organized around the work of André Baldinger and Philippe Millot. The exhibition, named Ping-Pong, Échange visuel presented a selection of their work from the last ten years. From type design to signage, through visual identity or the design of books and posters or scenography, their work covers a wide spectrum of visual expression and is regularly the subject of publications, awards and distinctions.

The exhibition was shown at Ecole régionale des beaux-arts de Besançon (ERBA; now known as L’Institut supérieur des beaux-arts de Besançon), ESAD d’Amiens, and Bibliothèque universitaire du Havre.

They used BVH BDot as the main typeface, to evoke ping pong balls, accompanied from time to time by BVH Eiffel Level.

Exhibition invitation

exhibition bookmark

The Maison de la Culture of Amiens (MCA) is the major hub for cultural events in this northern French city. In 2018 it equipped itself with a new visual identity described in a previous review. This post is dedicated to the means of communication that Julien Lelièvre worked out for the 2019/2020 season.

Three design principles can be discerned: graphically altered photographs, the use of vivid colors (at times plain, at times in gradients), and last but not least a set of eye-catching typefaces, all released by Production Type from Paris.

While the MCA logo lettering is set from PVC Banner Ultra, the figures “19/20” stem from PVC Dynasty. That same typeface was also used for most of the big-size headlines on posters and the chapter dividers in the program booklet. With its triangular serifs and the diagonal contrast axis, Dynasty shares some DNA with the romain Elzévir – the oldstyle roman of the French tradition – but cranks up the spikiness to eleven. The MCA 2019/20 season was one the first applications of the original serif, predating the release in Production Type’s LAB section in November 2021. The version seen here exhibits a number of differences when compared to the final version.

Both Banner and Dynasty were designed by Hélène Marian and are part of the larger display family PVC that also includes the narrow PVC Menu which you can spot in use as titling face in some of the media and as a secondary face on others. The bouquet of typefaces is rounded off with the (yet unreleased) Text version of Jean-Baptiste Levée’s Media Sans, Bold and Regular, used predominantly for texts for continuous reading.

Front and back cover of the season booklet, with Media Sans (left) and PVC Dynasty (right).

Spread from the season booklet with PVC Dynasty (left) and PVC Menu (right)

PVC Dynasty (big) and Media Sans (small)

Head and subhead in PVC Menu, text in Media Sans

Theater and opera posters, with PVC Banner (top), PVC Menu (center), and Media Sans (bottom)

Series of posters for music, dance, and circus performances

The zero (0) was not rotated by the designer, it’s the standard numeral included in the font.

“Hiver” (“winter”) uses shapes that are different from the final release, like the rectangular dot in i or the wedge-shaped flag in r.

“Printemps” (“spring”) likewise exhibits differences when compared to the retail version of PVC Dynasty: in addition to those glyphs already mention above, the bowl of P here meets the stem at 90 degrees, t has an angled top, p has symmetrical serifs, and s longer ones.

The “Ici” (“here”) map marker uses caps from Signal.

Fold-out poster with PVC Dynasty (headlines), PVC Banner (categories), Media Sans (single entries).

MCA logo lockup using PVC Banner Ultra

The city of Amiens in the north of France enjoys an excellent reputation for a number of reasons: being the ancient capital of the Picardie region, it attracts countless visitors that come for its picturesque old town with its fabulous cathedral (the biggest of France); secondly, Amiens’ name is deeply intertwined with that of Jules Verne who lived in this city from the time of his seminal Around the World in Eighty Days until his death in 1905; and last but not least, it is a very young city: close to twenty percent of its 130,000 inhabitants are students at one of roughly forty scientific facilities.

Serving as center for a catchment area of 400,000 people, Amiens also features a buzzing cultural life, and the biggest fish in this pond is the Maison de la Culture, the MCA. It is a multi-partite house staging exhibitions, movie screenings, music, drama and dance performances and provides the city’s largest theater with more than 1,000 seats. The MCA was inaugurated in 1966, following the national plan for decentralization in the field of the performing arts. It is classified a “national stage” which means that it is publicly financed, partly by the city, the region, and the national state, in order to enable an artistic production of regional as much as of national relevance. The current building is fruit of early 1990s post-modernism.

In 2018 the institution adorned itself with a new visual identity that was carried out by French graphic designer Julien Lelièvre, in collaboration with Bureau Jigsaw, Hélène Marian and Jean-Baptiste Levée, from Paris-based type foundry Production Type. Central to the overhaul was a striking typography. The new concept drew from the full arsenal of Production Type’s library.

The first and central type family that has to be mentioned here is PVC by Hélène Marian. By the time of the redesign of MCA it was just fresh from the egg. Back then, PVC came in three flavors, PVC Banner, PVC Menu and PVC Promo, which are each very different from the other. (A fourth flavor, PVC Dynasty, followed in 2021, and a fifth is in the pipeline.) What they share is the exploration of extremes in typeface design. The fonts you see the most in use in this post are Banner Ultra for the logo lettering as much as Menu and Promo for the headlines.

In the reading texts you will spot Production Type’s Media Sans and specifically its text variant which is yet to be released for general licensing. In some of the media designed for the 2018/19 season, Lelièvre recurs to further typefaces, namely the serifed Cardinal (by Jean-Baptiste Levée, Yoann Minet, and Quentin Schmerber) and the sans-serif Signal (by Emmanuel Besse).

The figures stem from PVC Menu which is also used in the yellow field. The reading text in the blue field is Media Sans and its text variant, yet to be published.

The MCA logo is in PVC Banner Ultra, with Media Sans for the address. The figures to the right are from PVC Menu, with “ICI” (“here”) in Signal.

Program and member card

PVC Menu as headline, Media Sans and its text variant below

PVC Promo

PVC Banner & PVC Promo

Exhibition poster with PVC Menu for the title

Program for the Festival Amiens Europe using Signal

Media Sans in Condensed Bold (yellow) with shadow effect, with the regular-wide Bold at the top right

Roof offers all-inclusive student accomodations in the French cities of Lille, Amiens and Valenciennes. Their branding was handled by Paris based agency StudioPaack, who created a custom wordmark, supported by typography set in two styles of Agrandir. On selected posters, the tagline uses Open Sans.

The Golden Age, a political epos is the title of an exhibition that took place at the Maison de la Culture in Amiens, France, in 2021. It was dedicated to the original artwork of Âge d’Or, a French graphic novel by Cyril Pedrosa and Roxanne Moreil.

The work appeared in two volumes in 2018 and 2020, respectively. On the top level, it is a fairy tale of a princess in the middle ages, largely inspired by medieval society, literature, and visual art. On a secondary level, however, it is a parable of our Western societies of the early 21st century, addressing topics such as class society, the relation between sexes, and the question how well-established societal orders can come to a change. The graphic novel was a big success in France and won several prizes.

The exhibition in Amiens was mounted in the framework of the 25th Festival de la bande dessinée. It was designed by Julien Lelièvre whose scenography allowed for an immersive delve into the artwork of the books. Spectators could learn about the genesis of the novel and find thematic points of access to the topics addressed.

From the typographic realm, Julien Lelièvre chose Media Sans, a family by Production Type first launched in 2015 and still being extended. The big typographic panels show Media Sans Extended Black in the headlines, together with the yet to be released text version of that typeface. Distinctive features that can be very well observed in this application are the extreme x-height of the lowercase letters and their almost non-existing ascenders and decenders. Eye catching!

To design the booklet 12 jours à Amiens Métropole (“12 days in Amiens Métropole”) by Mehdi Zannad, Brest Brest Brest used the typefaces Maax Unicase and Maax Rounded by Damien Gautier, both distributed by 205TF.

From Maison de l’architecture:

Through the design and distribution of a drawing guide of these plural architectures, accompanied by the inhabitants, their words and their experiences on the territory, Mehdi Zannad reveals through drawing, these natural sites, these buildings, these constructions and these materials, which shape the cities and the countryside of the metropolis.

[ ... ] Mehdi works in collaboration with a graphic designer, in charge of arranging the drawings to give a map, a route, so that everyone, inhabitants as well as tourists, can seize it to discover Amiens and the surrounding villages. The editorial object will have this format: 22×11 closed format, and 66×44 unfolded format. There will be 5 accordion folds and 1 “rolled” fold to close the map.

Gigantisme is an art triennale taking place in Dunkerque, France. In the context of a collaboration with Cnap, the National Centre for Visual Arts, a selection of films from the collection of the institution was shown at the Cinéma Orson Welles in Amiens. The films programmed for Les lundis de Gigantisme all offer different representations of work, as seen through the lens of urban space.

The association between the strong presence of architecture and the toughness of our society’s relation to work needed a font that’s able to assess these aspects in its shapes and not only in the words it bears: it is Media Sans. Julien Lelièvre had the good idea to use Media Sans Extended for the design of the poster part of this leaflet. The huge red letters seem to shout a warning signal, an emergency that is still very much recognizable even with the poster folded into a leaflet. The programme on the other side is devoted to legibility, showing the diversity of Media Sans family including its upcoming Text styles.

The logo of the Cinéma Orson Welles uses PVC Banner Bold.

Three years ago, a year after the tragic and unexpected passing of Jean-François Danquin, a character that was very important in my scholarship but also in my life, I took care of the design of a book displaying his whole tribal art collection. The book had two goals: being a worthy memory of him and his collection and being the catalog of the auction sale that was about to happen to disperse his massive gathering of statues, masks (over 300 pieces without ever stepping a foot on the African continent) and books into the hands of other collectors (hence the date and prices indicated).

The book is an heterogeneous mixture of studio pictures of the pieces, texts, private photographies, stamps, paintings, lists … If I would have designed it in the 1970s or 1980s I would probably have used typefaces like Jacno, Vendôme, or Antique Olive, that were highly popular at the time. But as I was designing it in the 2010s I rather chose Framboisier (a typeface based on Jacno’s work designed with Dorine Sauzet for an exhibition) for titles and paratext elements, Duplicate Sans by Christian Schwartz for the numerous captions, and the still-unreleased Ganeau Book by Sandrine Nugue for written texts by or about Danquin.

Éditions Vivement Dimanche / 240 pages / 20×26.5 cm [see an extract online]

PS: This book is the first of the Collection(s) Danquin series, the second one being Accumulation de plaques publicitaires émaillées (about his enamel plates collection) designed by Michelines. The third one remains to be published.

Jean-François Danquin is pictured in front of his (almost) whole collection at the beginning of the book facing the title page.

I designed a map to locate every tribe featured in the book. Current African borders are indicated.

The introductory texts are set in Ganeau Book roman with a Framboisier drop cap.

The book features some pictures of Danquin’s playing with his pieces that we found in his photo books.

Danquin was particularly fond of Gelede masks from the Yoruba tribe. A whole section of the book is dedicated to them.

As Danquin was not only collecting tribal art pieces but a lot of others things too, we included some stamps from his collection where appropriate.

Danquin was a painter. Here’s a self portrait of him showing the Igbo statue shown on the left page. There’s several of his paintings in the book.

Extracts from Danquin’s writings from a previous book scour the book. They are set in Ganeau Book italic.

Framboisier was used for the page number and the running tribe identifier on the bottom of each page.

The book was designed with a structured but flexible grid allowing a lot of different picture layouts.

Black and white pictures indicate pieces from his collection that weren’t for sale because they were offered to some of his relatives and friends, lost, or buried with him. A lot of time has been dedicated to make sure the black and white wasn’t too flat and paid proper homage to these pieces.

The huge bibliography (over 1,500 references) featured at the end of the catalog was quite a challenge. I used Regular Expressions to design it (almost) automatically!

The endpaper was made out of some Danquin’s scribbles that we found on a loose sheet of paper. I shaped them to pay homage to Tintin’s endpapers (he was a big fan of it) and added his signature at the bottom.

This little booklet was made for an exhibition on an island in Amiens, using the sturdy Proto Grotesk typeface and Quick Marker as a vivid counterpart.

The cover, set only in lowercase, loosely refers to old Sega cartridges.

Gerard Marin:

Press Dossier for Circo Interior Bruto. A Jules Verne Circus (Amiens) initiative to publicize the Spanish contemporary circus projects developed within and outside the national territory.

Great use of Alias Glue for logotype and headlines, A2 Regular provides utility with an edge for text.

A group of students at École supérieure d'art et de design d’Amiens from 2011 (Lucie Fournis, Sidonie Terencio-Arrouet et Clément Bonnerat), developed the project Archive as part of their studies. They used the Eskapade family by Alisa Nowak throughout the publication.

The book presents diploma theses from the years 2004 to 2010 which reference the subject “identity”. Extracts of text from the diplomas were in content adjusted to texts by the poet Philip Roth.

From April 8 to May 3, 2009, the École Superieure d’Arts et de Design (ESAD) in Amiens featured an exhibition of drawings by the artist Rafael Mahdavi. At the occasion of this show, the school published the accompanying catalogue, showing the eight canvases together with texts and an interview conducted in Paris in January 2009. ESAD graduate Lucille Guigon was commissioned to conceive the design and layout of this publication. As typeface for the entire text, Lucille chose Nassim, using its various weights and styles to clearly distinguish different text categories.