Media Sans

Media Sans In Use

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  Nuits sonores ("Sonic Nights") is the title of a yearly event dedicated to electronic music, visual and performance art that takes place in Lyon, France, in the month of May. It was initiated in 2003 by Arty Farty, a non-profit association whose purpose is to serve youth culture, democratic renewal and public welfare. The event traditionally starts on the Wednesday before Ascension Day – which, in the French calendar, marks the start of the festival season – and lasts five days. Various locations across the city become part of a large parcours, from small galleries in the historic center via the banks of river Rhône to extensive abandoned industrial estates in the outskirts. In 2023 Nuits sonores celebrated twenty years of existence. On that occasion the curators wished to celebrate the jubilee with an exceptional visual identity. They asked Lyon-based studio Superscript², consisting of Patrick Lallemand and Pierre Delmas Bouly, to pick a young emerging talent to collaborate with – and they chose Anthony Couret of Studio Antho, a specialist in creative coding. Together they conceived the basic approach. With around fifty images representative of earlier editions of the event as a source material, they decided to treat these as if they were tiny samples of music. These visual samples were first repeated in order to build up a rhythm, then they were algorithmically dislocated in space to turn them into an oscillating texture, and finally interpolated into a diffusion scheme akin to the visualization tool of a music application. The result is a design principle that will reproduce a recognizable language while each medium might display a different specific outcome of abstract color waves. Apart from the generative code, the designers set on bright red, blue and yellow as colors, a custom-drawn “NS 20” for Nuits Sonores 20 years and on Media Sans as the leading display typeface. As subordinate secondary typeface you will see Suisse Int’l in all caps in some of the pictures in this post. Media Sans is a collection of 42 styles assorted in five families ranging from Extra Condensed to Extended. The common feature is an extremely high x-height that allows for very tight line spacing. The typeface designed by Jean-Baptiste Levée stems from a project for French newspaper Libération. Since 2018 it’s available to the general public from Production Type.

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  Nuits sonores 2023
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  Het beest in ons (“The beast in us”) is the title of a special exhibition that was on display from June 2022 through January 2023 at the Museum for Natural History of Rotterdam, which, according to their website, is “a dead serious museum”. For this project, 25 writers across the Netherlands were invited to reflect on the challenges of contemporary human society from the perspective of a chosen animal. While a fox ponders food security, a jaguar comments on framing, and an albatross speaks about homosexual parenting, to give just three examples. The written texts were taken to the streets of Rotterdam by means of a small truck. Passers-by were invited to read the texts aloud inside the truck in order to record their voices for the museum’s audio guide. Eventually, the exhibition brought together the Dutch authors, the museum exhibits, and the voices of the citizens of Rotterdam. To top it all off an accompanying book was published. The recordings, meanwhile, can be listened to on the museum’s website. Responsible for the visual design of the whole project was Rotterdam-based Studio Spass, founded by Jaron Korvinus and Daan Mens. The concept is based on three very clear design principles: the silhouettes of animals, bright plain colors, and one typeface, Media Sans by Production Type. Apart from a few cases the silhouettes of the animals are filled with text, and this text consists of the buzzwords of our current societal discourses – a very clever way to graphically combine the two sides of this project. Media Sans is a good choice to realize this concept: with its extreme x-height and respectively extremely short ascenders and descenders, it allows for very tight line spacing, even with lowercase typesetting. This also makes the nice animation of the type inside the animals ever more convincing, as can be seen on the exhibition’s micro site. Featured in the pictures to this post is almost exclusively Media Sans Bold, but the project made use as well of Media Sans Text, a text-optimized version that’s not officially released yet.

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  Het beest in ons, Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam