Besançon school of fine arts is based on a modernist building by Josep Luis Sert (1972). With Rainer Oldendorf and students, we defined a signage system composed in Garaje 0503 Monospace Black, used for the logotype I designed at the time. Letters were reproduced in 2 sizes, A4 and A6. Rainer Oldendorf and Gilles Picouet engraved litterally the concrete wall of the main entrance, to inscribe physically this 750-units grid on the building. The paper letters were directly stuck on the wall, to announce the events of the school, forming a continuous palimpsest.

Garaje takes its inspiration both from the alphabets of the Bauhaus school and the vernacular inscriptions of Spanish garage owners: two worlds that share a desire to reduce typographic forms to simple geometric elements. At the Bauhaus this geometrization is ideological: it represents a rejection of tradition and the affirmation of an objective and rational vocabulary. With garage owners it is a simple matter of logic, certainly due to an ignorance of tradition. It is somewhat naïve to wish to reduce the shapes of the alphabet to elementary forms. Perfect geometrical forms seem less than perfect to our eyes: type Design abounds with optical corrections that compensate for our perception of forms.
Garaje plays specifically with this paradox: its construction is rigorously geometrical, anchored to a scalable modular grid, with no optical correction. A perfectly objective system, but a typographical aberration, simultaneously right and wrong. For the last 20 years, I have extended this family in every direction, to the point of absurdity: extremely narrow or outlandishly wide letterforms, all built from the same modules. Today it is a complete system, available in 44 widths and 5 weights. The complete family counts 445 fonts, hundreds of thousands of glyphs, and zero contrast: Garaje is a typeface which is at the same time brutal and playful, rational and naïve. Garaje Wide subfamily goes from 0505 (5 on 5 grid) to 05015 (5 on 15 grid) and includes 55 fonts + 1 variable font. Its construction allows to compose in many widths without changing the stem weight.
Published by 205TF

Custom typeface for the Atelier d’architecture Tardy & associés, Besançon

Antique Étroite is first a metal type that I discovered in the typography workshop of the School of Fine Arts of Besançon, where I studied. It is part of the numerous anonymous sans serifs, of unknown origin, of the beginning of the XXth century. Its design is far from perfect, but it is precisely these imperfections that I like: odd proportions, unconsistency, which produce an interesting flavour that I wanted to restore in digital form. I adapted the 60pt size, before noting that the different sizes of the family presented huge differences: a lack of coordination in its development, less systematic in the techniques of the time. I therefore digitized all the sizes, respecting the errors and approximations of the sources. Unpublished

Hangar 23 is a theater in Rouen, in western France. Its programming offers a very broad spectrum, from theater to dance, and from circus to world music. To illustrate this variety, but also the context of the Hangar surrounded by the port and containers, I created a monospace version of Garaje 0703 Black, with many alternates, which color the message differently. Unpublished

Mononi is a monolinear, sans serif version of the famous Bodoni, cut by Giambattista Bodoni in Parma at the end of the 19th century. I first created it for the visual identity of the Théâtre musical Besançon, a theater built at the same time by the architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. Mononi has a classic and refined structure, a baroque italic, but traced with a ballpoint pen. Combined with a normographer’s aesthetic, deliberately very crude, Mononi’s weights are growing from its skeleton. A special version, Mononi Zero, has no body. It is up to the user to determine the thickness of the line, thus allowing a multitude of weights, down to the finest hairlines. In 2012, I added Mononi Monospace versions, for the same theater which became the Scène nationale de Besançon. Soon available on www.205.tf

For the visual identity of the Film Festival Entrevues Belfort, I typographically tranposed the name of the event, inter-views, in a very literal way. This to evoke, of course, the cinematographic film.
Letters are cropped between multiple lines : I used the Open Source fonts League Gothic, by the League of Moveable Type, as a base for the all-caps custom typeface.

Visual identity for B31 company, created by my friend Guillaume Lab in Nancy. Great posters for car lovers! B31 is the codename of a French sign, a white circle with a black crossbar, which means “end of all prohibitions”.

Identity and flyer for the exhibition of the Type Directors Club at ECV Paris, 2013. Typeset in Garaje, in various weights, widths and sizes, and one single stroke.

Visual identity of Kazuo design showroom in Biarritz, France. https://kazuo.fr/showroom/