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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.

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.

Trax is France’s leading magazine and website for electronic music and culture. Founded in Paris in 1997, Trax was historically intermingled with its subject (from the early days of the “French Touch” to later major acts), witnessing, recording, and surviving the dramatic changes of the music industry and the rise of electronic culture. In 2013, the magazine was eventually bought by its own employees. Trax turned 18 in 2015 and decided to reflect these changes with a new format. Production Type’s Jean-Baptiste Levée, in collaboration with Large design studio, rethought the new Trax from the ground up. Starting from a new magazine format and art direction, and a new logo drawn by Levée (based on Stunt Nord, a standalone style of the Stunt family, to be released), the overhaul extended beyond the magazine to all aspects of the Trax brand, such as the website, events, and digital products. The type palette provided by Production Type is a compound of existing off-the-shelf types, new extensions, and previously unseen designs. The main text typeface is Cardinal, a serifed alphabet drawn by Yoann Minet & Quentin Schmerber under Levée’s guidance. Cardinal refers to many classic Jannon-inspired typefaces that were popular in 1990s digital culture, and distantly echoes the ill-fated typeface ITC Garamond. In this way, Cardinal Photo and Cardinal Fruit are two extra sidekicks, reminiscent of an era where the early photocomposition faces were swapped with their electronic counterparts. Stratos, Minet’s own design, while being unreleased at the time, was featured in the layout since the first issue redesigned by the team. Minotaur Lombardic & Proto Slab debuted on the cover of Trax magazine (respectively on issues 185 & 190), too. Existing designs from the Production Type catalog were also put to use across all Trax channels: Minotaur, Minotaur Sans, Minotaur Beef, Countach, and Proto Grotesk, which gained newly drawn weights specifically for the brand. Read more about the project on It’s Nice That and see more pictures on Large website.

Ludia is a developer of video games based in Montréal, Canada. The company was founded in 2007 and grew big with releases of games derived from popular TV content. Since 2011 they have been specializing in games exclusively for cellphones, which has made them a pioneer in the field. Currently almost 400 people work for Ludia. In 2021 Ludia was taken over by another game developing company, Jam City, based in Culver City, California. This event prompted the rethinking of Ludia’s corporate design. It was conceived of and carried out by LG2, Canada’s biggest independent design agency, with offices in Montréal and Toronto. The new brand design is based on three clear elements. First of all, a scheme of vibrant colors that bring joy and connect the visuals to the core of the business: playing. Second, the treatment of the images: instead of overloaded screenshot scenes from games, single objects are given iconic prominence. And last but not least, a typographic treatment that adds a very sober, straightforward tone to it all. The typeface used is Stratos, designed by Yoann Minet and released at Production Type in 2016. It is a geometric sans that combines condensed caps with significantly wider lowercase characters of a modernist appeal. This results in different “spices” of the typeface according to its use. The derived Ludia logotype picks up on the condensed spice and intentionally emulates the contour of a smartphone. But the designers of LG2 didn’t stop there. Apart from online and offline media, they also redesigned Ludia’s office space in Montréal, following the same spirit, mixing playful colors and sober typography.

Since the French Percent-for-art program has been extended to the Ministry of Transport in 1980, the country saw more and more rest areas along its highways embellished with public art sculptures. Some are truly exquisite, others less so – beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What most of them have in common is the colossal size. Astoundingly, this quality didn’t save them from being overlooked by general public and art historians. There was no comprehensive register or database covering France’s “Highway Art” until graphic designer Julien Lelièvre took the initiative. From 2009 to 2015 he travelled thousands of kilometers, photographing and documenting 71 of these pieces of art. In 2019 Lelièvre’s research was translated into the richly illustrated book Art d’autoroute, designed by Building Paris. It was the first title of their new publishing branch Building Books, dedicated to landscape, urbanism, and architecture. For the typography of the book, Lelièvre teamed up with Emmanuel Besse who, in 2018, had released Signal Compressed in Production Type’s LAB section. Besse’s Signal Compressed draws its inspiration from the lettering painted on streets to inform drivers. In this book, the typeface is used in small quantities but prominent spots. The second typeface used, Signal, was actually developed around this publication. It has its roots in Caractères, the lettering style for French road signage, legally defined since 1948. The designers complemented it with lowercase letters and carried it to a fully functional typeface suitable for setting reading text. Emmanuel Besse and Production Type meanwhile developed Signal into an extensive family.

The Campus des Métiers d’Art et du Design is a space fostering reflection and exchange for professionals working in the fields of art and design in Paris and the Île-de-France region. The Académie du Climat aims to be the new landmark for ecology in Paris, providing means to educate, explain, learn and better understand the climate challenge. Together, the two institutions launched an exhibition that showcased environmentally-friendly art and design works. It featured projects by graduates of seventeen art and design schools from the Campus des Métiers d’art et du Design. The title of the exhibition references the book Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek (1923–1998), a leading advocate of eco-responsible design in the 1970s. Jeanne Triboul worked on the visual identity including the design of the printed matter and the wayfinding, together with Coralie Milière of Studio Silex. For the title and display typeface, they chose Signal Compressed by Emmanuel Besse. With its squeezed proportions, it conveys an appropriate sense of urgency. Its reversed contrast – with horizontals that are thicker than verticals – also echoes the look of wood type as used in the American Wild West, making Signal Compressed itself a “design for a wild world”. On a practical level, its narrow proportions allowed the designers to show the title in very large letters. The exhibition poster, which was Riso-printed at Quintal Atelier, also serves as a guide with information and floor plans on the back. The text and the labels are set in a stylistically quite different typeface that’s likewise available from Production Type: it’s Sainte Colombe, an expressive serif designed by Yoann Minet. Sainte Colombe is also used for the names of the participating schools shown as “shooting stars” on the front. Design for a Wild World was shown at the Académie du Climat from September 8–12, 2022, during Paris Design Week.