Kessler
Kessler In Use
- Issy Wood – Study For No at Lafayette Anticipations
Study For No is the title of Issy Wood’s first solo exhibition in France. The show by the up-and-coming painter from London is on display at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris until January 7, 2024:
Borrowing its title from a 2019 painting, it explores the potential of refusal, discussing and resisting orders which secretly weave their way into our daily lives. Building through seduction, humor and cynicism, her work is marked by the recurrence of serialized motifs: hypersexualized glossy leather jackets, gleaming car interiors, immaculate porcelain sets, representations of animals, female figures, and self-portraits —all counting as sites where our ways of being are played out.
Curator Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel commissioned Pierre Vanni with the visual identity of the exhibition. Among the items designed by Vanni are the exhibition poster, subway ads, and a bilingual booklet. The selected artwork is an unnerving one, certainly for those of us who are dreading our next dentist’s appointment. It’s titled Study for Wednesday (oil on linen, 2022; © Issy Wood, courtesy the artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; and Michael Werner, New York. Photographer: Stephen James).
There are two title typefaces used throughout the applications: Kessler is Alaric Garnier’s contemporary take on inscriptional serifs, released with Production Type. Englische Schreibschrift is a classic Anglaise with not-quite-joining letters. It was made in-house at Berthold in the 1970s, under the supervision of Günter Gerhard Lange. All text is shown in silver, echoing the shiny metal of the dental drill.
- Florae, Van Cleef & Arpels
Florae is an exhibition organized by Van Cleef & Arpels in Paris. It takes place from the 10th of September to the 14th of November 2021. The brand invited the famous Japanese photographer and film director Mika Ninagawa for a carte blanche that would relate the brand’s famous floral jewelry with her saturated and colorful imagery. Ninagawa’s work is full with colors, natural patterns and, of course, floral settings: the world of Van Cleef & Arpels is transformed into this girly pop universe, shedding a new light on its key pieces. The exhibition is structured into three parts, each one presenting a different approach of the craft of jewelry: naturalist aesthetics, bouquets, and stylized aesthetic.The scenography of the exhibition was designed by Japanese architect Tsuyoshi Tane, founder of the studio ATTA in Paris. He conceived an immersive setting based on light and mirrors: for example, some panels displaying Ninagawa’s photographs would suddenly fade and the image vanish to turn into the reflexive glass of a mirror. This dream-like labyrinth makes the visitor feel like Alice in Wonderland. Besides, the exhibition takes place in the Hôtel d’Évreux, a former mansion house in the center of Paris: the Hôtel is a treasure of classical architecture, which identifies Van Cleef & Arpels as a luxury brand.No wonder that Kessler from Production Type was chosen for the exhibition logo. Even though Kessler is inspired by stone-carving and inscriptional typefaces, its thin upstrokes and serifs, the unusual proportion of its capital R and its very much recognizable A also evoke typefaces and publications from the Ashendene Press and more widely, from the Arts & Crafts movement, and their margins saturated with floral patterns. Accompanying text on poster, invitation and other items is set in Gotham.
Information
Design
Alaric Garnier
Team
Quentin Schmerber
Hugues Gentile
Arthur Schwarz
Léa Bruneau
Awards & distinctions
Type Directors Club New York 2020 Certificate of excellence
About this font
Kessler Text is the natural companion to Kessler Display, reflecting the same structure, but with the technical nuance required of smaller scale, long-form texts.
Where its Display shines in the details of its hairlines and diamond shapes, Kessler Text distills this personality, ensuring the same twinkle without losing weight or causing reading discomfort. Kessler Text Regular is comfortable at 8pt with 12pt leading, while the Light weight will want slightly more scale to hold together. There is a ton of character in the small, sharp details maintained in the Text sizes, and distinctive curves found in glyphs like the lowercase a are maintained across all of Kessler’s styles. The italics carry the rhythms of Kessler quite literally forward, particularly with its standout, looping lowercase g. Other notable characters — such as the spurred lowercase r and the aristocratic capital A — sustain rich texture and even typographic color.
Traditionally, one could swap out the Text weight for the Display once the scale exceeds, say, 16pt. For more emphatic titling, or if you’re just too lazy for the nuance, Kessler Text Light can still serve just fine at larger sizes, and will create a more impactful horizontal rhythm due to the more significant top serifs. You’ll still get to enjoy Kessler’s diamond-shape titles and humble curves of its bowled letters.
Kessler Mono takes all of this systemic thinking and applies it to a monospace structure. Sure, one could say it’s a bit overdressed for coding, but who hasn’t met an engineer with a diva complex? The spacing is blissfully wide and doesn’t sacrifice detail by forcing characters to fill the width. Use the beautiful lining numerals, delicate brackets and backslashes to create an elegant texture.
Setting the point sizes with consideration to ample leading will help the white space maintain evenness — 9pt text with at least 13 pts of leading will achieve this, but be careful not to overdo it and lose the thread of the paragraph. Setting a handful of words in the mono will create a wholly unique essay title; a couple of lines of AI prompts might just encourage surprising results.
