Trianon
Styles
Trianon Caption ExtraLight
Trianon Caption ExtraLight Italic
Trianon Caption Light
Trianon Caption Light Italic
Trianon Caption Regular
Trianon Caption Italic
Trianon Caption Bold
Trianon Caption Bold Italic
Trianon Caption Black
Trianon Caption Black Italic
Trianon In Use
- Fétiches by Camille Holtz
Éditions FP&CF is a French non-profit organization that aims to share the works of illustrators and photographers through small-run publications and zines. Their editorial direction focuses on original topics, as can be seen in one of their latest publications: Fétiches by Camille Holtz. The young photographer and film director offers a dive into the world of canine beauty contests, through a series of photographs and a variety of texts, which include descriptions of dogs with the specific vocabulary used in this context, interviews, or even poems, each of them representing an aspect of this particular environment. The strangeness of this relationship to animals is shown through overexposed flash-light photographs or close-up shots of dogs, one or the other technique making the animal weirdly still or even abstract. To express the status of precious objects that these dogs have acquired, Guillaume Grall from Building Paris designed a booklet whose preciousness is felt through its different papers: a thick light grey cover, a glossy paper for the photographs, and an apricot colored stock for texts in the center. The photographs alternate with text set in Trianon, designed by Loïc Sander and available from Production Type. Trianon has a versatility that many Didone fonts don’t show: following a research on the creation of Didot’s small sizes, Sander came up with a family of five different styles with matching italics, which express the different aspects that can be found in the original design of Didot, from readability to its usual contrasted impact. Trianon was initially designed for text and comfortable reading; its use in Fétiches accompanies the reader while keeping the characteristic elegance of Didot. It almost looks like an ironic twist of fashion magazines such as Vogue or Elle, except the models are replaced with pedigree dogs: the ambivalence shown in Camille Holtz’s photographs and texts is therefore made visible in the design of the publication.
Van Gogh's Dream is an app developed exclusively for the iPad by digital publisher MNESTRA (Manufacture Numérique d’Éditions Strasbourgeoise) to raise funds for the Van Gogh Institute. At the time of its release, Van Gogh’s Dream was one of the first app designed with Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite, enabling implementation of interactive contents such as videos, HD pictures, sounds and a few more features, allowing the user to experience and appreciate the different aspects and characteristics of the work of Van Gogh in a sensitive way. Regarding typefaces, MNESTRA’s former art director Loïc Sander chose a neat palette: Tungsten for titles, drop initials and interactive features; his own still-in-progress typeface Trianon (then called Bréviaire) for text, and Cogito for captions.
Trianon Caption Black + Cogito Black
Van Gogh’s Dream
Information
Design
Release Date
2021-04-04Team
Version
1.002Awards & distinctions
About this font
It is that small stuff that is also at the root of Loïc Sander’s exploration for Trianon. He plunged into sources from Firmin Didot’s later work as well as other type from the late 19th and early 20th centuries based on the Rational or pointed pen form model. There he discovered the qualities that are even more essential to Didot than its high contrast: its verticality, its rhythmic spacing, its ability to set readable text — one that encourages and rewards a relaxed pace. A memorable read is not necessarily the fastest, most invisible one. Trianon proves that a Didone can be much more versatile than it is usually assumed to be. Returning to the pre-digital wisdom of size-specific cuts, the family offers four optical sizes: Caption and Text built broad and sturdy for long passages of small type, and Display and Grande which imbue all of the sparkling contrast and sharp, sculpted bracketing of a familiar Didot.
Each subfamily has five weights with matching italics. The Text size comes with one extra weight for those who want paragraphs with a slightly lighter color. And ExtraLight styles bring an entirely fresh effect to Didot with their nearly monolinear weight capped by slab serifs and subtle teardrops. These inventions emphasize the fact that Trianon is not only a restoration of Didot (especially in the large sizes) but very much its own thing.
For Trianon, Sander focused on editorial publishing, where type is primarily a tool for serving content, and where he feels the call to build his own tools. The fonts are replete with useful function for editorial design, including oldstyle figures (based on the classic Didot) and lining figures (cued by vernacular street signs in France), ornaments which fit each font’s contrast and weight, and a large range of weights for building harmony and contrast into a publication’s complex hierarchy.
