This brochure is about citizen communication. More precisely, not about any citizens, but about the target group of Leipzig organizers. For the editorial design of the brochure, we explored the corporate design boundaries of the city of Leipzig and made the whole thing "artsy", especially through font, colors, paper choice and the playful-natural illustration style. By picking the joyful and easy-going Apfel Grotezk for headlines and the cover, we extended the strictest visuals of the city of Leipzig without losing the corporate elements. Body text is set in Helvetica.

Pierre Pané-Farré. License: All Rights Reserved.

Soirée Fantastique is a captivating visual journey into the 19th century, to the early days of both posters and photography. Conceived and designed by Pierre Pané-Farré, the book won the Gold Medal in the competition Best Book Design from all over the World and also was awarded at the Walter Tiemann Prize 2018.

Pierre Pané-Farré. License: All Rights Reserved.

Stacks of posters from Oskar Leiner’s print shop.

Pierre Pané-Farré. License: All Rights Reserved.

In the mid 1800s, posters began to be mass-produced. It was the first time that typographic letters became visible in the urban space on a bigger scale. The basis for this book is a bundle of 330 posters from this period, which Pané-Farré unearthed in the archives of Leipzig’s city museum. They all originated at a single print shop, the Buchdruckerei Oskar Leiner, and date from 1847 to 1876. Most of them are letterpress-printed, sometimes combined with lithography, and show an increasing diversity of type styles and sizes. This – together with the use of woodcut illustrations, colored ink and paper, as well as larger paper sizes – suggests an intensified competition for attention in the streets. A selection of 64 posters are reproduced in color and presented in stacks, allowing the reader to reenact the experience in the museum’s archive and leaf through the broadsheets. They are interspersed with twelve poster details shown at actual size. These fragments are letterpress-printed from stereotypes in a single color.

Pierre Pané-Farré. License: All Rights Reserved.

City photographs by Alexander Seitz (left), letterpress-printed reproduction of a poster fragment (right).

The inclusion of 58 historical photographs form an ingenious counterpart to the posters. Taken by Alexander Seitz between 1860 and 1885, they depict Leipzig’s urban space in the period when the city grew into a metropolis, and became the center of ­German book printing. These are the same streets and squares where the posters once were posted and viewed, and some pictures actually show the venues where the advertised attractions like circus and variety shows took place.

Pierre Pané-Farré. License: All Rights Reserved.

The photographs are reproduced from the five-volume album Das alte und neue Leipzig. The original captions and image sequence were retained.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Detail of the title page.

For the book typography, Pané-Farré combined three typefaces. FF Balance Regular (Evert Bloemsma, 1993) is used for the short accompanying text (bilingual; English and German), the index, and the captions to the photographs. On the cover and the title page, it’s paired with caps in the No. 71 style from Knockout (Jonathan Hoefler, 1990), a gothic series inspired by 19th century wood types. In contrast, Balance is an intentionally contemporary choice. According to Pané-Farré, it was partly chosen for its inktraps. With this feature, Balance promised crisp results when being letterpress-printed from photopolymer plates.

The undisputed cover star is Schmale Egyptienne No.12, a digital revival of Eduard Haenel’s Schmale Egyptienne 28 Cicero (c. 1838–41), made by the book designer himself. The condensed slab serif was later released as part of the Affichen-Schriften series by Forgotten Shapes. It here is used with the high i dot and the compact Q, two forms that ended up in the font as alternates. Forgotten Shapes is a new type label that was launched by Pané-Farré together with Reymund Schröder and Stephan Müller in 2018. It’s committed to publishing “digital reconstructions of typefaces that have somehow vanished”.

Soirée Fantastique was published by the Institut für Buchkunst Leipzig in spring 2017 in an edition of 500 copies. Unsurprisingly, the book is out of print. If you still want to get your hands on some Soirée Fantastique goodness, rejoice: As a complement to the book, Pané-Farré printed a limited edition of letterpress posters. There are a few copies left both of the official color version as well as of the “bootleg” version, i.e. hand proofs printed in black.

Source: panefarre.com Pierre Pané-Farré. License: All Rights Reserved.

The accompanying poster was letterpress-printed in iridescent colors. The fonts in use are various wood, brass, and metal types from the poster type collection of the HGB’s printmaking workshop. Most of them stem from roughly the same era when Leiner printed his posters. This was before typefaces had proper names; they go under generic designations like “Egyptienne” etc. We haven’t tracked down and listed them here, since the focus of this article lies on the book. If you’re really curious, we might consider a follow-up post.

Source: panefarre.com Pierre Pané-Farré. License: All Rights Reserved.

The forme used for printing the posters.

Pierre Pané-Farré studied at the HGB Leipzig in the class for type design of Stephan Müller and Fred Smeijers and graduated in 2012. From 2013 to 2016 he was a master student with Smeijers. Soirée Fantastique was Pané-Farre’s final project at the HGB. In 2014 he co-curated Vom Buch auf die Straße, an exhibition at the Printing Museum Leipzig about large letterforms of all kinds. His research on early 19th-century poster typefaces was published on the Forgotten Shapes website, see Affichen-Schriften.

Full disclosure: The author of this article is a board member of the society that organizes the Walter Tiemann Prize. In 2018, he had the honor to serve on the jury for the Best Book Design from all over the World. Florian provided the English translation of the articles by Forgotten Shapes.

Typotopografie is a magazine that takes a closer look at the typography and printing art in urban centres. Each edition focuses on another city and displays its unique typographic flair. The first three issues about Munich, Düsseldorf, and Berlin were published simultaneously in 2012. Typotopografie is published by August Dreesbach Verlag. The design is credited to Anne Dreesbach, F.J. Keselitz, Munich, and Manuel Kreuzer, Büro für visuelle Gestaltung, Hauzenberg. Since issue 4, the design lays in the hands of Dreekreuz (Dreesbach & Kreuzer).

Meret Pro Bold is used for the magazine logo. For the interior typography, various weights from Meret Pro are paired with Soleil. The images show the issues 4 and 5 about Leipzig and Vienna, published in 2013.

FF Kosmik as typeface for web headlines, poster and merchandise products.

The Leipzig “Typotage” type conference takes place since 1995 in the printing museum, first as a two or three day fest, since 2008 as a one day event. After many years of changing looks, Maurice Göldner and Susanne Richwien gave the Typotage a new and current design. The website, realised by Zentrumwest, makes great use of Thomas Thiemich’s typeface Remo, published by Ourtype. (As an aside, Göldner and Thiemich, as well as Peter Mohr and Monique Dickmanns of Zentrumwest, studied typeface design in Leipzig with Fred Smeijers.)

The titles of past conferences link to their respective old website and show how excellent the current design for 2014 is.

Creative Cities is a documentary project by Alina Cyranek. The short movies give a portrait of 7 people who are engaged in the cultural sector in Leipzig, Germany. The documentaries were made by order of Creative Cities. The films can be watched at alinacyranek.com.

Four talkes as a book by Olaf Nicolai and Jan Wenzel, 320 pages, 280 image, German, published by Spector Books, Leipzig and Rollo Press, Zürich.