Playlist: These fonts live in my mind rent free

The Maison de la Culture of Amiens (MCA) is the major hub for cultural events in this northern French city. In 2018 it equipped itself with a new visual identity described in a previous review. This post is dedicated to the means of communication that Julien Lelièvre worked out for the 2019/2020 season. Three design principles can be discerned: graphically altered photographs, the use of vivid colors (at times plain, at times in gradients), and last but not least a set of eye-catching typefaces, all released by Production Type from Paris. While the MCA logo lettering is set from PVC Banner Ultra, the figures “19/20” stem from PVC Dynasty. That same typeface was also used for most of the big-size headlines on posters and the chapter dividers in the program booklet. With its triangular serifs and the diagonal contrast axis, Dynasty shares some DNA with the romain Elzévir – the oldstyle roman of the French tradition – but cranks up the spikiness to eleven. The MCA 2019/20 season was one the first applications of the original serif, predating the release in Production Type’s LAB section in November 2021. The version seen here exhibits a number of differences when compared to the final version. Both Banner and Dynasty were designed by Hélène Marian and are part of the larger display family PVC that also includes the narrow PVC Menu which you can spot in use as titling face in some of the media and as a secondary face on others. The bouquet of typefaces is rounded off with the (yet unreleased) Text version of Jean-Baptiste Levée’s Media Sans, Bold and Regular, used predominantly for texts for continuous reading.

Cylindre is a studio for design and graphic research, founded by Vincent Desclaux, and active on the axis Paris—Montreuil. In December 2022, it launched a spinoff dubbed Cylindre Club. On this playground, Cylindre designs and distributes graphic objects related to bikes and bicycling, as expressed by the slogan “wheely good stuff”. All of this is done with a focus on crafts and collaboration, for a “super-local and meaningful production”. Just like routes are central to biking, space and time play an important role in Cylindre Club’s process, too. The club members love detours and getting lost in maps. This geographic aspect is found back in the presentation of the online store. For all products, the involved providers and partners – think printers, textile companies, and other craftspeople – are not only credited. They are listed with the distance it takes to travel by bike to the respective facility: while the sticker manufacturer is located in Nantes (350 km), the trusted Risograph print studio can be found in nearby Paris (7.2 km), and the embroidering service of choice is just around the corner in Montreuil (500 m), etc. This way, Cylindre Club maps out their network and shares the acquired know-how for a graphic production that’s local and sustainable. The experience is progressive, and Cylindre Club points out they’re always on the lookout for new recommended addresses. The club’s identity is based on two typefaces. Kreuz was designed by Emmanuel Besse of Large, Paris (7.0 km), and published by Production Type, situated a short sprint further to the west (8.4 km). Built around the visual metaphor of nuts and bolts, Kreuz is an obvious choice for a project concerned with crafts and bikes. If Kreuz is the mechanic, its counterpart is the pacemaker. Superette, a script typeface distinguished by a drastic slant angle, adds velocity. Superette hails from a more distant source: conceived by Canadian type designer (and avid cyclist) Ross Milne, its initial inspiration draws from a peculiar style of semi-connected script lettering on the fruit and farm signs spotted in Île d’Orléans in southern Québec. Superette is available from Commercial Type, a foundry based in New York and London. This typographic team of two features in the logo and the website. It’s also used to render the punny texts on the posters, shirts, buttons, and other items offered by the club.

Le rucher de Laouilhaou (“Laouilhaou’s apiary”) is a producer of honey based in Monségur, in southern France. Beekeeper Pierre Lamothe oversees the entire process, from building the hives to harvesting and potting the honey. Coralie Milière of Studio Silex designed a simple yet effective and beautiful labeling system. The product-inspired colors indicate the type of honey: a creamy beige for the polyfloral flavor, an estival violet for flower honey, and a sunny yellow for acacia honey. The typeface chosen for the purely typographic label designs is Media Sans by Production Type.

Initiated by Fruiting Body (Lucie Pinier & Matthieu Levet) during the Homografía | Homography (H.H.) queer video and performance festival in Brussels, Eastern Voices collects the words of artists and activists from Eastern Europe and Russia: Anatoly Belov (Ukraine), Zofia Nierodzińska (Poland), and from Russia Sasha Zubritskaya and Krasnye Zori (Helga Zinzyver, Anna Tereshkina, Yuliya Kozhemyako, Anastasia Kriazhevskaia). Coming from countries where the mere fact of being LGBT, woman or artist can put you at risk of being imprisoned or targeted, their practice cannot be separated from their commitment. The object, very condensed, printed on thin paper, makes us think of a suffocating newspaper. The density of the texts comes to crush a gigantic pagination, which occupies all the little space left for it. The graphic design of the object conceived by Hélène Marian, is a reflection of the interviews that it gives to read: speeches all the more powerful that one tries to stifle them. It is laid out with her many-faces PVC type family for the titles (the super dense PVC Promo and the spiky PVC Dynasty and in the narrow Cardinal Fruit for the body copy. All three typefaces are available from Production Type. Risograph printed on sealed leaflets waiting to be released, the contrast between the dull blue of the text, the grey of the paper and the blinding brilliance of the gold of the titles reminds us of the brightness of these lives of courage. In view of the situation in Ukraine, all profits from sales of the remaining copies of Eastern Voices are going to associations helping Ukrainian refugees. — Editorial concept by Fruiting Body: Lucie Pinier and Matthieu Levet Graphic design: Hélène Marian-Srodogora Printed in Brussels in September 2021 on Habitant.e.s des images ASBL’s risograph printer. Proofreaders: David Jarrin, Laura Lot, Fanny Quément Published by La Garconniere Prod & Homografía | Homography Festival

French studio Maison Solide designed this visual identity – and stamps! – for Murs à fleurs, a flower farm in Montreuil (France) that sells seasonal plants. A funny fact is: the material for the communication of the brand is bringing together the Trabis font, designed by Axel Pelletanche-Thévenart, and the Francesco font, designed by his former teacher, Franck Jalleau – reuniting two generations of typeface designers in one identity.