From 9 October 2019 to 27 January 2020, the Grand Palais in Paris showed a huge exhibition of works by French painter Toulouse-Lautrec. It was the first major retrospective in the artist’s home country in decades. The show was accompanied by a number of publications, including an illustrated exhibition journal, a bilingual paperback edition with reproductions of all featured images, and a full-featured hardback catalog edited by Stéphane Guégan.
The display typeface used for all these publications is Zangezi. Started in 2018, Daria Cohen’s in-progress design is inspired by Salem, a metal typeface first cast by the Keystone foundry in 1901 – the year of Toulouse-Lautrec’s death. It’s used for headings and quotes, occasionally featuring its italics, too. Zangezi is also used for the exhibition logo that shows the artist’s double name in two stacked lines. The initial letters here touch each other, with unilaterally clipped serifs.
Zangezi is paired with Stanley for text. With its sharp details, Ludovic Balland’s reimagination of Times New Roman is a good fit for the eccentric Zangezi. Captions are set in Aidos. The “semi-proportional typewriter” face by Alex Rütten nicely blends into the mix, echoing Zangezi’s “Latin” wedge-shaped serifs.