Jason – Thirty years without sticking

Jason is a book displaying the collection of skateboarding stickers of Michaël Jason Plasse who spent thirty years collecting these objects without ever sticking them. Owner of a skate shop in Lyon, France, Plasse has gathered a collection of more than 5,000 stickers from both famous and obscure brands, from which a selection has made it into the book. Jason is an homage to skate culture, where graphic design works at valorizing a field considered too long as “alternative“ and not to be seen under an aesthetic lens.

Benoît Canaud self-published this bilingual book in French and English, in collaboration with Michaël Jason Plasse and Johan Chanéac, following a successful crowdfunding campaign. He also designed the book which is thought of as an indexed catalog of the collected stickers. Therefore, the layout is quite simple, contrasting with the diversity of styles, as much graphical as illustrative, that can be found in the collection. The cover is particularly interesting, because it evokes a part of stickers we don’t usually give attention to: the support, which is thrown out immediately once the sticker is put on another surface. Even though we are not facing a reproduction of this white glossy paper, the negative treatment of the sticker is a direct reminder of the materiality of this object, which can’t be experienced inside of the book.

The text is set in Mars from Production Type, using the Extended as well as the recently released Standard widths. Inspired by vernacular signs from the United States, Mars is particularly appropriate to echo a space and time where skate culture emerged, and impacts the design of the book with its large width: the texts in French and English are mirrored not vertically but horizontally throughout the book.