Cover of Littoral

Littoral explores the French coastline both as a place and as a concept, through multidisciplinary contributions ranging from science and architecture, to everyday coast guard’s work, and scholar research. A continuous glossary working as a second mode of narration runs throughout the book at the bottom of each page. It gathers thoughts, ideas, references, and worked as a logbook in the book making process. Artist Daniel Pontoreau contributed a print as interruptive artistic intervention.

This diverse content structure is brought together by a simple layout rule: text blocks always take the same width (depending on their content) and are placed evenly spaced. It is the images that intervene and push the following text column towards the right edge of the page — like waves washing up the shore.

The texts flow freely from left to right, only being interrupted by new headlines, vertically set in Marionette by Nick Sherman. Marionette’s quirky shapes find a “simple” counterpart in Monono, drawn by Simon Thiefes specifically for this book. The typeface is used for the cover and captions.

Published by Editions Peuplier (Guy Pimienta and Roland Baroin)
Graphic design by Haymann Thiefes Studio (Joshua Haymann and Simon Thiefes)
Print run: 200
Lay flat binding, 68 pages

The spreads are printed on one sheet. On some pages the titles are thus directly printed on the page fold.

It is the images that intervene and push the following text towards the right edge of the page.

Detail of captions, heading, and body text

Headlines are vertically set in Marionette.

A continuous glossary working as a second mode of narration runs throughout the book.