Festival international de la bande dessinée d’Angoulême 2020 posters and logo
Rumiko Takahashi, surrounded by a motley crew of manga characters, with Sapphire from Osamu Tezuka’s Princess Knight at the center.
The Angoulême International Comics Festival was first organized in 1974. One of the largest comics festivals in the world, it attracts more than 200,000 visitors each year. For the 47st edition in January 2020, three artists were invited to create a poster: Rumiko Takahashi, winner of the Grand Prix 2019, Charles Burns, and Catherine Meurisse. The common theme is the same one as introduced last year: a self-portrait of the artist as a child, discovering comics, forming the basis of their passion, and even their vocation.
The script typeface is Parkside … with a twist. Designer Mark Simonson comments:
An unusual sighting of my Parkside—backslanted! It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at. So familiar… and then it hit me. I should totally do this as an actual font.
The typographer is not credited. [It’s Philippe Ghielmetti, see comments.] The all-caps small print uses Albert-Jan Pool’s FF DIN, which is the festival’s brand typeface and also appears in the logo.
Charles Burns in the woods, immersed in The Shooting Star (L’Étoile mystérieuse), the tenth volume of The Adventures of Tintin by Belgian cartoonist Hergé.
Catherine Meurisse on a boat, reading La Grande Traversée (Asterix and the Great Crossing) by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo.
Festival logo.
5 Comments on “Festival international de la bande dessinée d’Angoulême 2020 posters and logo”
Here’s how “Angoulême” looks like in unmodified Parkside. The distortion in the backslanted adaptation is particularly noticeable in the left-leaning o and the unbalanced circumflex.
Parisian agency Le Goff & Gabarra had been in charge of the festival’s graphic identity from 2013 to, at least, 2018. It’s hard to know if this has changed since but you can start from there if you’re trying to track the typographer.
Merci, Quentin! I have asked the festival’s press contact.
When developing Parkside, I was consciously aware of its similarities to one of my other faces, Coquette. You can really see it when it’s backslanted like this.
The typography was provided by Philippe Ghielmetti.