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

Initiated by Fruiting Body (Lucie Pinier & Matthieu Levet) during the Homografía | Homography (H.H.) queer video and performance festival in Brussels, Eastern Voices collects the words of artists and activists from Eastern Europe and Russia: Anatoly Belov (Ukraine), Zofia Nierodzińska (Poland), and from Russia Sasha Zubritskaya and Krasnye Zori (Helga Zinzyver, Anna Tereshkina, Yuliya Kozhemyako, Anastasia Kriazhevskaia).

Coming from countries where the mere fact of being LGBT, woman or artist can put you at risk of being imprisoned or targeted, their practice cannot be separated from their commitment.

The object, very condensed, printed on thin paper, makes us think of a suffocating newspaper. The density of the texts comes to crush a gigantic pagination, which occupies all the little space left for it. The graphic design of the object conceived by Hélène Marian, is a reflection of the interviews that it gives to read: speeches all the more powerful that one tries to stifle them. It is laid out with her many-faces PVC type family for the titles (the super dense PVC Promo and the spiky PVC Dynasty and in the narrow Cardinal Fruit for the body copy. All three typefaces are available from Production Type.

Risograph printed on sealed leaflets waiting to be released, the contrast between the dull blue of the text, the grey of the paper and the blinding brilliance of the gold of the titles reminds us of the brightness of these lives of courage.

In view of the situation in Ukraine, all profits from sales of the remaining copies of Eastern Voices are going to associations helping Ukrainian refugees.

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Editorial concept by Fruiting Body: Lucie Pinier and Matthieu Levet
Graphic design: Hélène Marian-Srodogora
Printed in Brussels in September 2021 on Habitant.e.s des images ASBL’s risograph printer.
Proofreaders: David Jarrin, Laura Lot, Fanny Quément
Published by La Garconniere Prod & Homografía | Homography Festival

Autoreverse is a project by Nina Garcia (electric guitar) and Arnaud Rivière (electronics). The first release by the experimental/noise duo is titled Esreverotua. Yes, that’s Autoreverse, reversed. Esreverotua features two live recordings of 20 minutes each, and is freely available for download from Da! Heard It Records (donations are welcome). The record also comes in the form of a compact cassette, in a limited edition of 111 copies.

Here’s where Esreverotua becomes interesting on a visual level, too. Hélène Marian took care of the graphic design. Instead of creating the usual J-card, she came up with a solution that is as direct and unconventional as the music itself. The exclusively typographic design is printed right on the plastic case and the cassette itself, in white ink. Paris-based Institut Sérigraphique provided the screen printing. The fonts are Marian’s own: she combined several styles of her heterogeneous PVC series – the superwide Banner, the impactful Promo, and the economic Menu; the latter being her personal take on a typical French brush lettering style. All fonts are used in all caps. They are arranged in rhythmic sequences and loops that feed back into each other, with some words amplified in volume, aptly visualizing the sound of Autoreverse. Marian also made an animation to promote the release which picks up the motif of a winding tape, as well as a matching tour poster. PVC is available from Production Type.

A “writing surface for experimental sound practices”, Revue & Corrigée is a quarterly magazine on experimental movements in contemporary music, performance, cinema, dance, sound installation, and sound poetry. It was first published in 1988.

For the special 30th anniversary issue, French designer Hélène Marian was given carte blanche. She limited herself to a single color – red – but went all in with the typography, and indulged in a wild mix from several styles from her own PVC series. In addition to the extrawide PVC Banner (in regular and Ultra weights) and the punchy PVC Promo, the issue also has a preview of the upcoming PVC Dynasty. This sharp serif will further expand the range of the heterogeneous typeface collection. In a supporting role, another typeface from Production Type: Minotaur Sans is used for body copy.

In July 2019, four movies directed by Italian legend and master of horror Lucio Fulci were re-released in France in selected movie theaters. For this retrospective event, the distribution company Les Films du Camélia created a unique poster and a video trailer. Each movie gets its own distinctive typeface: Perversion Story (Una Sull’altra | One on Top of the Other) is set in Ohno Blazeface, L’emmurée vivante (Sette note in nero | The Psychic) uses an unidentified condensed sans, La longue nuit de l’exorcisme (Non si sevizia un paperino | Don’t Torture a Duckling) features CSTM Xprmntl 02 Bold, and Le venin de la peur (Una lucertola con la pelle di donna | A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin) is presented in Plinc Cooper Nouveau. The general typefaces of the mini-festival are Chercán and Knockout.

Like I did in the past, I can legitimately assume that the designer once again used Fontstand for its design, as the identified typefaces (except Knockout) are all available on this platform for renting fonts.