Richly illustrated and printed in two colors (purple and pink), Tous les dictionnaires sont des monstres (“All dictionaries are monsters”) is a text by Sébastien Dégeilh. It details Paulo de Cantos’ approach through a dictionary that is surprising both in the texts it contains and in the graphic and visual forms used, demonstrating great inventiveness and audacity for the time. Paulo de Cantos’ work remains little known to lovers of graphic design and book arts, despite his iconoclastic, avant-garde, and prolific output.

This is the fifth issue of La petite collection, designed by Roman Seban. As with every issue, the number is printed on the cover, typeset in his own Bertin typeface. The body text is typeset in Kelvin by Thomas Bouville, while the drop caps and quotations are from Tifo by Romain Tronchin. All of these fonts are available from 205TF.

La petite collection is co-published by the Association Presse Offset and the École européenne supérieure d’art de Bretagne (EESAB), site de Lorient, in partnership with type foundry 205TF.

For their fifteenth full-length release, The Avett Brothers came to us to design a layered visual experience that embodies the deeply personal and calmly existential collection of songs that make up their eponymous album. The design articulates a pattern language that frames the band’s exploration of spirituality, intimacy, and rootedness. We turned to the complex, contemplative diagrams and charts of ancient gnosticism and hermeticism for initial inspiration. From there, we expanded our range of influences to poetry, and the band’s own deeply place-based (and significantly rural Southern) lineages.

This led to a rich, detail-oriented typographic palette that references literature, mystical diagrams, and vintage religious texts to create a textural atmosphere that is at once storied and contemporary.

Garamond Premier, Adobe’s version of the serif all-star, carries the suite’s body copy and titles, setting a sophisticated, literary tone that avoids coming across as stuffy or antiquated. Out of the Dark’s Syncro Italic, Rokha (W Type Foundry) and Dédale (205TF) are used as complementary fonts from the LP jacket interior diagram to the lyric “poetry” chapbook for their strong character and classical references.

A flexible website supports the album release, combining the contemplative, bookish atmosphere of band’s off-road lives with the invigorating energy of their live performances. Its typography takes a more modern, evergreen approach, with SwissPosters by newglyph and The Future (Klim Type Foundry) contrasting Garamond Première.

[More info on Discogs]

Catalogue No.2 is a porfolio presenting the work of the German artist Stefanie Pojar. Graphic design studio GRUETZNER TRIEBE used Thomas Bouville’s Dédale to design the booklet.

To design this set of three maps and the poster for Uriel Orlow, the design studio In The Shade Of A Tree chose Kelvin Sans by Thomas Bouville and Corona by Chauncey H. Griffith.

From Uriel Orlow:

Uriel Orlow has created three maps to celebrate the centenary of the Becontree Estate. Through the rich variety of plant life found on the estate, the maps tell stories of global migrations, cultural history and botanical remedies. Looking at Becontree through the prism of plants, we can trace rich histories of global connections and migrations, discover food sources and healing remedies for the body, and encounter stories of traditional use or cultural significance. The maps are available free of charge at the Valence House Museum & Valence Library (Becontree Avenue), the White House (884 Green Lane) and throughout Becontree Estate.

Commissioned by CREATE for the Becontree centenary, based on a botanical survey of Becontree Estate conducted by Denis J Vickers, a consultant ecologist living on the estate.

Au-delà de la peau (“Beyond the skin”) is the second publication in La petite collection (“The small collection”). This text, written by Annick Lantenois, offers a brief historiography of system books, commonly known as pop-up books. The text traces their appearance in the history of the book through to contemporary publishing practices.

To design this booklet, Roman Seban used his Bertin typeface, Dédale by Thomas Bouville and Alcalá by Damien Gautier. La petite collection is co-published by the Association Presse Offset and the École européenne supérieure d’art de Bretagne (EESAB), site de Lorient, in partnership with type foundry 205TF.

This poster was made for a talk I'm giving with the Art Directors Club of Tulsa on April 6, 2023. The design is inspired by old circus posters that playfully mix all sorts of weights, widths, and styles of type; my take is modified and updated to feel a bit more anachronistically modern, with unexpected typefaces like LCD, Moore, and Casserole (Oh No’s “resuscitation” of Davida) adding a 70s and 80s flair to the more traditional slab serifs like Rockwell Condensed and Deming. The image is excerpted from Engenhocas, a vintage Portuguese DIY magazine from the 1940s.

Rousset uses the agricultural working village of his childhood, on the border of France and Switzerland, to examine the totemic and ritualistic aspects of rural life.

Over twelve years, Thomas Rousset has probed every corner of his family village to create a surrealistic yet tender docu­fiction of its inhabitants. As small­-scale agricultural villages appear stuck in time or close to extinction, Rousset catapults Prabert into a fantastical, hallucina­tory world, creating heightened moments of absurdity amongst intimate portraits and observations of daily village life.

In his creative collaborations with his fellow Prabérians, Rousset engages with deep traditions of rural eccentricity and a dignified non-conformity that unites and binds communities against the harsh realities of everyday agricultural life. Rousset mixes these exaggerated scenarios with striking landscapes and naturalistic portraits, hinting at the creative potential locked within the land and its inhabitants, and the daily dance between work and play, solemnity and joy.

Work In Park is an office building in Lyon designed by AFAA Architecture. Bureau 205 developed a signage system based on the typeface Dédale by Thomas Bouville (205TF) whose thinness and serifs remind the proportions of the building and the mineralized interior garden.

Néolithique Anthropocène. Dialogue autour des 12 000 dernières années (“Neolithic Anthropocene. A dialogue about the last 12,000 years”) provides an opportunity to read and see reflections on the human footprint on the planet: the transformative footprints of the Neolithic period, revealing humanity's interrelationship with the rest of the living world, the predatory footprints on resources and bodies of the plantation culture from the beginning of the 16th century, and the toxic footprints that were visible after the Second World War, which are part of the ‘great acceleration’. Questioning the origin of this crisis of the Earth's habitability and glimpsing its complexity also means opening up the possibilities for the future. Looking back over the last twelve thousand years allows us to grasp both the richness and the extent of the transformations carried out by our species in such a short time: if we imagine the existence of the Earth from its origins to the present day as a 24-hour day, Homo Sapiens arrives at 11:14 pm!

Bureau 205 has produced a large-format book with a hardback cover and sewn binding. The principle of squaring, visible from the cover and throughout the pages, evokes archaeological excavations. The typeface Dédale, designed by Thomas Bouville (205TF), is perfectly suited for the particular evolution of its design according to the weights available: Light, Regular and Bold.

To design the books of the Critic’s Essay series published by Floating Opera Press, Daniela Burger used Kelvin Avec, designed by Thomas Bouville and distributed by 205TF.

Published on the occasion of the retrospective exhibition dedicated to the Moroccan painter Farid Belkahia (1934–2014), this catalogue affirms the artist as one of the founders of Moroccan and, more widely, Arab artistic modernity. To design this book, Huz & Bosshard used the typeface Dédale designed by Thomas Bouville and published by 205TF.

The exhibition was shown at Centre Pompidou from 19 May to 19 July 2021. It was realized together with Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, and in collaboration with the Fondation Farid Belkahia, Marrakech.

To design this book, Fanette Mellier used the Kelvin Avec typeface designed by Thomas Bouville and distributed by 205TF.

From the presentation of the book by John Deneuve on the website of the publisher Arnaud Bizalion:

How to weave a link between performance, music and painting? With this proposal for a collection of texts, I have tried to illustrate my aesthetic experience and thus approach the sociology, semiology, history and psychoanalysis of the things that interest me. Taken in a purely optical or sonic situation, these texts are meant to complete the understanding of the rest of my work and allow me to advance each concept of it more clearly. The writing, like an exotic and animal champagne effluvium, is the substratum and the extension of my plastic, performative and musical work. Through this book, always at the border of different aesthetic categories, I would like to question the injunction to the norm, the traps of the unique thought. I try to deconstruct. The texts echo. In worried and admiring submission to the results of production while listening to the new definitions of gender and the new feminism, I embrace myself as a true virgin. Between tasteful and trashy romanticism, between pro-sex feminism and daddy’s love, between Jean Genet and a Harlequin novel...

On the occasion of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Tony Garnier (1869-1948), the utopian city project imagined by the Lyon architect in the early years of the twentieth century is the subject of a unique edition, since no true facsimile has ever been produced from the original 1917 copy. Two contemporary authors introduce the project by placing it in its historical context and questioning its significance a century later.

Une cité industrielle consists of 164 plates: plans – of the whole city, of a district or of a detail – are accompanied by illustrations in perspective – washes or watercolours. This edition reproduces all of the documents, some of which are larger than A0, to the scale designed by Tony Garnier.

The large-format documents are reproduced on a set of unbound booklets so that they can be “recomposed” by the reader. All of the documents are also reproduced in reduced format to give an overall view.

Bureau 205 used the typefaces Kelvin Avec and Kelvin Sans designed by Thomas Bouville and published by 205TF.

Commissioned by Paris Musées, Thomas Oudin (Mo-To studio) designed the graphic identity for the largest ossuary in the world: Les Catacombes de Paris, or the Paris Catacombs, with the remains of approximately 6 million humans.

This essential place in Paris reaches a very international public (more than 500,000 visitors per year, 47% of whom are foreign), requiring a simple, direct and sober graphic language.

This project was the subject of a typographic commission: Dédale designed by Thomas Bouville. This hybrid typographic family between the category of incises and slab serifs is deployed in three distinct weights in order to meet the common uses of composition.

Dédale is available on 205TF. See more images on the portfolio website of Mo-To.

Les Plantes et Babylone (“Plants and Babylon: looking at weeds in urban surroundings”) by artist Joas is dedicated to urban flora. Système Sensible (Charlotte Gauvin and Matthieu Meyer) used Kelvin Sans, designed by Thomas Bouville and distributed by 205TF. More information on Lesplantesetbabylon.fr

This beautiful book offers a selection of photographs from the Plants of Babylon project, a series of snapshots made daily and started in 2006. It highlights the spontaneous nature of weeds encountered in urban areas, during travels and trips. Plants find balance and manage to exist in the interstices of cities, where we do not expect them. The floral world settles in the urban space under unfavorable and sometimes hostile conditions. It is less the appearance of the plants that guides this photographic work than the desire to share the beauty of their quiet presence in the streets.
— François Decobecq, foreword

The greeting card with good wishes for the year 2019 from the Drôme department in the south of France was designed by Système Sensible (Charlotte Gauvin and Matthieu Meyer). They combined colorful lettering with text set in Kelvin Sans, designed by Thomas Bouville, and Minuscule, designed by Thomas Huot-Marchand.

Eloïsa Pérez designed the book working spaces by Cannelle Tanc for Immanence éditions with Kelvin Sans, created by Thomas Bouville, available on 205TF.

Ravisius Textor describe themselves as: “Educational space bookshop art and design / risography / exhibitions / conferences / workshop managed by Tombolo Presses with former and current students of Esaab.”

The place was opened by Thierry Chancogne who co-founded the online journal Tombolo and the publishing house Tombolo Presses. The signage was realized by Ninon Chaboud and Jimmy Cintero with Kelvin Avec, created by Thomas Bouville, available on 205TF.

Exterior signage for the Musée de l’Armée (Army Museum) in Paris, France. Design studio Empreinte used typeface Kelvin Sans, created by Thomas Bouville, available on 205TF.

Editorial direction and coordination: Véronique Marrier, project manager for graphic design et Bénédicte Godin, editor.

For the twentieth edition of Graphisme en France, the French National Center For Visual Arts (CNAP) published an exceptional issue evoking the issues that drive the field of graphic design. It was designed and formatted by Charlotte Gauvin and Matthieu Meyer with the typeface Kelvin Sans, created by Thomas Bouville, available on 205TF.