Looking For Architecture, the title of this book and the name of the agency founded by Laurent Graber and Antoine Trollat, encapsulates in three letters – L F A – what drives and sustains the architects’ work: restoring meaning to the act of building at a time when architecture and urban spaces are being profoundly impacted by global change.

To design this book, Éditions deux-cent-cinq used the typeface Muoto with Muoto Mono, designed by Matthieu Cortat and distributed by 205TF. The title of the book is composed in LFType (also seen on the poster in the first image), a custom typeface designed by Patrick Lallemand and Pierre Delmas (SuperScript²) for LFA’s visual identity in 2012.

Source: nuits-sonores.com Superscript². License: All Rights Reserved.

Nuits sonores is a festival held every year in May in the French city of Lyon. It is dedicated first and foremost to electronic music, but it remains very open on its fringes, including neighboring musical genres as well as featuring visual arts and performances. It provides a stage for local musicians and at the same time has a European and international outlook, inviting musical groups and DJs from around the globe – not only with the intention of listening to them, but also for talks, workshops and networking.

The event was first organized in 2003, initiated by Arty Farty, a non-profit association devoted primarily to furthering youth cultures. In that sense the festival is well placed in the city of Lyon. It is the third largest city of France and the second largest metropolitan region with over two million people, and what it more: Lyon’s numerous universities draw a student crowd as big as 200,000 which makes it a very young city. As the number of spectators almost increased tenfold over the past twenty years, it is safe to say that Nuits sonores enjoys a wild success and represents a beacon in Lyon’s cultural calendar.

In an earlier post we featured the visual identity of Nuits sonores’ 2023 edition designed by studio Superscript². In this post we will show the designs that this studio realized for the editions of 2011, 2012, and 2013.

Source: www.instagram.com Superscript². License: All Rights Reserved.

Samples of the (then in-progress) custom typeface as well as the NS logotype derived from it

2011

When Patrick Lallemand and Pierre Delmas Bouly of Superscript² were first commissioned by the festival, they decided to take a clearly typographic approach and began working on a custom typeface, NSType, on which they elaborated further the following two years. What started with a geometric all-caps sans-serif skeleton evolved into a graphic experimentation on stroke variation for the 2011 edition. The typeface displays thin strokes that rhythmically interrupt the letters and provide them both with a sense of distortion and of adornment. In many of the 2011 media this play on interruption is carried further in the applications in which duotone photographs are overlaid by the typeface and fields of thin lines. In its modular approach NSType bears similarities with Acier by A.M. Cassandre. The alphabet’s plain variant was the starting point for the NS logotype that is in use ever since.

Source: www.flickr.com Superscript². License: All Rights Reserved.

The 2011 poster series featured photographs of nocturnal animals including a badger and a boar.

Source: www.flickr.com Superscript². License: All Rights Reserved.

2011 poster with program

Superscript². License: All Rights Reserved.

Superscript². License: All Rights Reserved.

Poster in the streets of Lyon, 2011

Source: www.flickr.com Superscript². License: All Rights Reserved.

2011 poster with a duotone photograph of a festival-goer

2012

While the 2011 edition made the letters shine in yellow and white over a midnight blue backdrop, the general appeal of the 2012 edition was all different: white and spacious were the backgrounds, with midnight blue and yellow replaced by purple and red. On posters, letter segments were substituted by duotone photographs of found objects. Additionally, the shapes of objects were stylized and introduced into the typeface itself. This way, they explored the border between typography and illustration.

Superscript². License: All Rights Reserved.

For the 2012 edition, Superscript² sought inspiration in found objects from the festival grounds as well as Lyon’s cityscape.

Superscript². License: All Rights Reserved.

These pictorial elements were mixed with the geometric letterforms.

Superscript². License: All Rights Reserved.

In a second step, some of the found elements – like scaffolding and cables – were incorporated in a stylized form into the typographic glyphs.

Superscript². License: All Rights Reserved.

Posters for the 2012 edition

Superscript². License: All Rights Reserved.

Posters for the 2012 edition

2013

The 2013 edition took a whole different path again: this time the designers relied fully on the plain variants of their letters. The supporting thought now was a reference to interfaces of music editing software and generative design methods.

Superscript². License: All Rights Reserved.

The 2013 edition plays with bars, triangles, and other geometric shapes.

Superscript². License: All Rights Reserved.

Poster for the 2013 edition

Superscript². License: All Rights Reserved.

Animated version detailing the layers of the layout

NSType was released as a small family in 2016 by Production Type. It is available in a monospaced and a normal subfamily. Each comes in two styles, A and B, that offer in sum eight different variations of how exactly the letters are designed. Check them out on Production Type’s website and make sure to play around with the setting for upper- and lowercase display.

Source: www.youtube.com Superscript². License: All Rights Reserved.

Back to back: Laurent Garnier vs. Carl Cox at Nuits Sonores, 8 May 2013, Lyon

Source: betwocoaching.com BeTwO Coaching. License: All Rights Reserved.

Olivier Blanc-Tailleur is a former fighter pilot and retired crew member of the Patrouille de France. In 2021, he started offering his services as a professional coach and speaker. Drawing from his own experience, Blanc-Tailleur aims to help individuals and teams to perform under pressure.

Artist and designer Maud Guerche of Strasbourg-based Atelier bora-bord was tasked to work on the visual identity. For the logo of BeTwO Coaching, she relied on InProgress. Despite its name, this typeface is already finished and available from Production Type’s LAB tier. Conceived by design studio Superscript² from Lyon, InProgress doesn’t have proper lowercase letters. Instead, it offers a second set of smaller caps that are raised and underlined. When used in mixed case, this results in a playful pattern – and in the case of “BeTwO” in a welcome symmetry. The second line of the logo is set exclusively in the smaller caps and hence with a continuous underline, providing the logotype with stability and strength.

Text on the website is rendered in A is for’s BTP. Designed by Guillaume Grall and Jeremy Perrodeau, it’s loosely inspired by fonts used in the AutoCAD software – and drawn exclusively from straight lines.

Source: www.instagram.com BeTwO Coaching. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: betwocoaching.com BeTwO Coaching. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: betwocoaching.com BeTwO Coaching. License: All Rights Reserved.

A box calendar made by Willow Creek Press in August 2022, featuring numerous trivia questions as its main gimmick.

Filmotype Maxwell is used extensively, both with its numerous elaborate interlocking ligatures and without. It’s accompanied by Countach, which is used for the “Full Color Daily Calendar” subtitle.

The same basic box design was used with different colors for the 2024 edition.

Source: www.pinkcouch.co.uk Pink Couch. License: All Rights Reserved.

The House of Fame is an exhibition conceived by British artist and musician Linder, shown at Nottingham Contemporary. At the heart of the show is a retrospective of Linder’s work –

spanning more than 40 years of photomontage, graphics, costume and performance. Emerging from the Manchester punk and post-punk scenes in the 1970s, Linder focuses on questions of gender, commodity and display. This diverse practice is presented alongside almost 200 works by some 30 artists selected by Linder.

Stretching from the 1600s to today – and gathering together the worlds of art and architecture, fashion and theatre, music and design – the exhibition includes works by Inigo Jones, Mike Kelley, Alison and Peter Smithson, Moki Cherry, Ithell Colquhoun and Heidi Bucher, among many others. The House of Fame draws upon Linder’s many sources of influence and wide-ranging collaborations.

Linder has spent the time leading up to this exhibition as the first artist-in-residence in Chatsworth House’s 500-year history.

The exhibition identity including the window display, a catalog booklet, and an oversized newsprint publication was conceived by Kajsa Ståhl, who’s a founding member of London-based design collective Åbäke and publishing hut Dent De Leone. For the title of the show, she used InProgress by Production Type. The logo-like lockup features capital ligatures, interlocking glyphs, and smaller underlined caps, all of which are part of the font conceived by Lyon-based studio Superscript².

For Linder’s name and accompanying text, Ståhl selected Bitstream’s digitization of Franklin Gothic. The museum’s logo is set in ST Elegant Contemporary, a custom revival of Elegant-Grotesk, commissioned by Sara De Bondt and drawn by Jo De Baerdemaeker in 2009.

You can do a 3D tour through the exhibition space on Nottingham Contemporary’s website.

See also Linder’s The Bower of Bliss, a site-specific installation at Southwark station, London, which likewise features InProgress.

Source: www.instagram.com Nottingham Contemporary. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: nottinghamcontemporary.org Nottingham Contemporary. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: nottinghamcontemporary.org Nottingham Contemporary. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.instagram.com victoriahelen02. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.instagram.com Kajsa Ståhl. License: All Rights Reserved.

Bar/dining room Rosella serves Italian food in Collingwood, Australia. Their signs and website were designed by Studio Round.

The identity pairs three typefaces with outspoken personalities. The restaurant name and sign are set in Solenizant Bold, designed by Maciej Połczyński and available from Le Laïc: Type Foundry. Solenizant is an all-caps design, with width increasing in subsequent weights. Secondary information is set in Helmut Condensed, designed by Superscript² and available from Production Type. Like Solenizant, Helmut contains no regular lowercase; instead it features small caps measuring half the height of the capitals (not used for the design of Bar Rosellla).

Short copy and the tag lines are set in the monospaced Clack Cursive, a freshly released typeface by Dennis Grauel, inspired by “styles found in select Underwood, Adler, Olympus and Hermes typewriters” — an interesting subgenre of typefaces, taking cues from a period in the mid-twentieth century when certain typewriter typefaces took inspiration from monolinear script fonts (see for instance Monoline Script) to lend a more spontaneous look to the typed output. Later digital typefaces which in turn are inspired by these script/typewriter hybrids include Operator Mono from Hoefler & Co. and the recently released Typewriter Script style of Dico (Bold Monday). These two are executed with more glyphs and more refinement than Clack Cursive. In this identity, the quirks of Clack Cursive fit right in, adding some warmth and charm.

The shop window and the menu use Myriad.

InProgress (Production Type) is used for a site-specific installation at Southwark station, London, commissioned by Art on the Underground from British artist Linder.

Linder created a 85 meter long piece of photomontage titled The Bower of Bliss, which “is a poetic euphemism for birthplace, for womb, for place of origin.” It’s displayed as street-level billboards that wrap around the entire façade of the station.

The typography employs several of the special features included in InProgress, like the underlined glyphs in the lowercase, or the discretionary ligatures (e.g. for HO, OR, EE, AR, TH, ER), some of which take the form of stacked letters (DE). The Bower of Bliss is on view until January 2020.

The artwork is announced via a poster that is displayed in every London Underground station.

Jardins (Gardens) was an exhibition presented at the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais. Paris-based studio Prototype designed the accompanying catalog.

For the book typography, Aurore Jannin and Laurent Pinon chose Trianon, Loïc Sander’s contemporary and expansive interpretation of the Didot genre. The typeface collection is utilized in a range of styles, including small caps and italics. Trianon Text serves for the body copy, with oldstyle figures and its characteristic rounded guillemets. The main text blocks are set justified with shaped corners – a treatment apparently made in reference to the layouts found in the jardin à la française. In order to keep the blocks nicely solid, paragraph breaks are marked by pilcrows (¶) instead of blank lines or indents. Trianon comes in several optical sizes. The sturdy shapes of its Caption cut guarantee good readability also in smaller sizes, like in the marginal notes. Headings are set in Trianon’s Display cut, which is distinguished by greater contrast and sharp, sculpted bracketing.

Trianon is paired with InProgress by Superscript². The sans serif with the eye-catching capital S comes in for subheadings and author’s names. The angular path-like wordmark on the cover is custom lettering.

Jardins is available from Éditions RMN – Grand Palais.

For its 125th birthday, Opinel, Savoy’s world-renowned knives brand, decided to publish a book about its history. Written by Jean-François Mesplède, this book tells the saga of this incredible family who originated the famous wooden-handled knives, illustrated by numerous documents sourced from the company archives and photographs by Thierry Vallier.

This rich and diverse content (testimonies, interviews, storytelling, technical documentation, anecdotes, maps, ancient and contemporary pictures…) was a challenge for Superscript², in charge of the book design. They chose a pretty wide palette of typefaces to complete the job: the main storyline about the family is set in National, all the extra-content is set in Proto Grotesk — using a lot of alternate glyphs (‘t’, ‘C’, ‘J’, ‘R’) in the text and the alternate condensed numerals for titling — while Stanley serves for captions, running titles and a few quotes. Their own Helmut typeface is the cherry on the top, used for the cover and several playful titles across the book, mixing its widths in the composition.

Éditions Pages d’Écriture / 160 pages / 22 × 27,5 cm

Trax is France’s leading magazine and website for electronic music and culture. Founded in Paris in 1997, Trax was historically intermingled with its subject (from the early days of the “French Touch” to later major acts), witnessing, recording, and surviving the dramatic changes of the music industry and the rise of electronic culture. In 2013, the magazine was eventually bought by its own employees. Trax turned 18 in 2015 and decided to reflect these changes with a new format.

Production Type’s Jean-Baptiste Levée, in collaboration with Large design studio, rethought the new Trax from the ground up. Starting from a new magazine format and art direction, and a new logo drawn by Levée (based on Stunt Nord, a standalone style of the Stunt family, to be released), the overhaul extended beyond the magazine to all aspects of the Trax brand, such as the website, events, and digital products.

The type palette provided by Production Type is a compound of existing off-the-shelf types, new extensions, and previously unseen designs. The main text typeface is Cardinal, a serifed alphabet drawn by Yoann Minet & Quentin Schmerber under Levée’s guidance. Cardinal refers to many classic Jannon-inspired typefaces that were popular in 1990s digital culture, and distantly echoes the ill-fated typeface ITC Garamond. In this way, Cardinal Photo and Cardinal Fruit are two extra sidekicks, reminiscent of an era where the early photocomposition faces were swapped with their electronic counterparts. Stratos, Minet’s own design, while being unreleased at the time, was featured in the layout since the first issue redesigned by the team. Minotaur Lombardic & Proto Slab debuted on the cover of Trax magazine (respectively on issues 185 & 190), too. Existing designs from the Production Type catalog were also put to use across all Trax channels: Minotaur, Minotaur Sans, Minotaur Beef, Countach, and Proto Grotesk, which gained newly drawn weights specifically for the brand.

Read more about the project on It’s Nice That and see more pictures on Large website.

The cover picture is by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari.

The New York Times Magazine’s 2015 Food Issue, art directed by Gail Bichler and Matt Willey used the Helmut typeface for all its titles and the index. In a tour de force, the magazine team managed to mix the three widths of Helmut, while also using stacked ligatures and tiled uppercases, even creating a custom ligature for the cover (‘Lo’). The result is delightful, astonishing and playful … exactly like the food!

This issue has won two Silver Medals at The Society of Publication Designers 51st Annual Awards: one for its cover, the second one for its entire design.

Production Type:

Developed for The Crew, a critically acclaimed auto racing video game, Countach evokes the muscular and mechanical dynamics of fast cars and urban adventure. The typeface is used throughout the game, from the user interface to the visual identity, delivering a wide variety information at sizes large and small, while staying true to car culture. And what do automotive enthusiasts expect? Strong lines, sharp angles, an italic that conveys speed, and numbers that work equally well on a legible dashboard as they would for the eye-grabbing decals on the hood of a race car.