• 2011
  • Théâtre musical de Besançon — lumières

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  • 2011
  • Théâtre musical de Besançon — lumières

A poster for the Théâtre musical de Besançon. The illustration is, as usual, very litteral : a crystal chandelier for a concert on the music of the Enlightenment. It is of course made of circles, and thanks to and thanks to a black pattern printed on the back, the chandelier lights up when the night comes, when the poster is backlit.

  • 2022
  • Leïla Buecher — Posters

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  • 2022
  • Leïla Buecher — Posters

Posters and street campaign for the opening of Leïla Buecher boutique in Barbès, Paris. Leïla Buecher is a talented and independent French jeweler.
Photos by Laurent Castellani

  • 2010
  • Musée d’Orsay

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  • 2010
  • Musée d’Orsay

The Musée d’Orsay wanted, in 2010, to renew its typography, returning to the typeface defined in its original visual identity, developed by Bruno Monguzzi and Jean Widmer (1986). The museum will was to update Walbaum, cut by Justus Erich Walbaum (around 1830), then unique typographic voice of the institution. With Philippe Millot, we defined a family of «cousins» of Walbaum, in styles that appeared later in the 19th century. For text typefaces, a Grotesk (sans serif and bold), and a Typewriter (slab serifs, low contrast, and light). For display typefaces, the uppercase present variations of texture in the manner of 19th century display type. Unfortunately, the Museum barely used this new typeface system.

  • 2023
  • La Vache qui rit

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  • 2023
  • La Vache qui rit

Custom typeface for La Vache qui rit (Bel).
The specific triangular shape of the slices of this popular soft cheese appears in many details of the typeface (A counter, diacritics, quotes…)
Laughing fonts include a “Bounce” weight, with a special feature which makes the letters randomly wiggling on the baseline.
Commissioned by BETC Paris
Art Direction Éric Poupy

  • 2020
  • Garaje Monospace

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  • 2020
  • Garaje Monospace

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 Monospace subfamily goes from 05015 (5 on 15 grid) to 3503 (35 on 3), and includes 215 fonts + 5 variable fonts. Its construction allows to compose in many sizes without changing the stem weight, and/or the pitch.
Available at 205TF.
Online specimen

  • 2017
  • Park MGM × be pôles

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  • 2017
  • Park MGM × be pôles

Park MGM is the new name of the famous Hotel Montecarlo, on the Las Vegas Strip (Nevada). It is owned by MGM Resorts. The agency be-poles (Paris / New York) commissioned me to design the exclusive typeface of the hotel, Alder, used for its interior and exterior signage, and all of its communication.
Rather than the excessive and often caricatured image of the hotels in the city, the visual identity of the Park MGM chooses elegance, with a very refined interior design. Likewise, Alder is inspired by the proportions of classic Roman capitals, with a more contemporary design. It comes in 4 weights : Regular, Bold, Italic and Condensed. Exclusive use

  • 2008
  • Musiques de Rues — Poster

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  • 2008
  • Musiques de Rues — Poster

Poster of the 3rd edition of Musiques de Rues, a festival of contemporary brass bands and artistic interventions in public space.

  • 2003
  • VLAN!

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  • 2003
  • VLAN!

A non-rectangular catalogue of Cécile Meynier exhibition Vlan ! At the Château Pertusier. With Nicolas Bardey. 32 p.

  • Le Pavé dans la mare
  • 200 × 300 mm
  • Offset, CMYK
  • Empreinte Imprimeurs
  • Typeface: Garaje
  • art CMYK
  • 2013
  • Émergences

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  • 2013
  • Émergences

Poster of the 6th edition of the festival Émergences, a week dedicated to young creation in Besançon. Matt Black + Gloss Black. Selected in Chaumont design graphique festival.

  • 2021
  • Bordures 2021

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  • 2021
  • Bordures 2021

Poster for the 2021 edition of BORDURES Festival in Langon
(PLAN B: 2020 edition postponed during pandemic)

  • 2011
  • MM — Typeface

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  • 2011
  • MM — Typeface

Ten years ago, when I was teaching at the school of fine arts in Besançon, one of my students, Julie Chu, carried out a very interesting project for her Master's degree, on the subject of interbreeding.
She had photographed the portraits of many girls in the school, and superimposed them: around forty faces, with low opacity, produced a new face. The result was surprising: a face that does not exist, certainly, but very beautiful. Seeing this work, I wondered if we could do the same thing, not with faces but with typefaces.
At the same time, I started working for the visual identity of a museum in Montbéliard, which holds important galleries devoted to natural history galleries, and in particular to the evolution of species: a famous zoologist and naturalist, Georges Cuvier, was born in Montbéliard in 1769. I took a closer look at Cuvier's theories, and in particular the fairly virulent debates that animated the Paris Academy of Sciences at the beginning of the 19th century. To be short, On the one hand there were the evolutionists, like Lamarck, and on the other the fixists, like Cuvier. Evolutionists believed in the gradual transmutation of one form into another: this led to the famous Darwin theories a little later.
Cuvier strongly disagreed. On the contrary, he believed that the species appeared and then suddenly disappeared, without changing during their existence.
I wondered, for the visual identity of the Musée de Montbéliard, if I could create two types of characters: one based on evolutionist theories, the other on fixist theories.
I picked 8 different text typefaces, very famous, which represent the main periods in the history of typography: Jenson, Garamond, Caslon, Baskerville,Bodoni, Century, Times New Roman, and Georgia. I used the amazing « Blend Fonts » feature in FontLab Studio and crossed the species over 4 generations, to get an average font, a kind of typographic chimera.
To accompany the text typeface, I wanted « fixist » a bold sans serif, which would be created from models of this family. Rather than interpolating these drawings, I chose a few letters in each, without changing it. This makes no sense, structurally. Some letters intersect vertically, others horizontally, or obliquely. Sometimes even in the same letter, like the C. To obtain a correct weight and proportions, these are not simple copy / paste, but rather interpretations. I wanted to see, in this way, if something acceptable could come out of this mess. I also add an evolutionist italic for the text one, and get a small family of three fonts. The bowl of italic lowercase k is ridiculous: the reason why is that this detail did not appear systematically in previous generations. These typefaces are full of such idiosyncrasies, which I don’t consider as defaults, but rather as traces of the process. I don't think theses fonts will ever be released: it was fun to do, and actually I'm using it for years for all the publications, scenography and signage of the museum. It's called MM Serif and MM Sans, for Musée de Montbéliard: and as a reference for Multiple Masters (there are several masters in it, obviously) and Adobe Serif MM et Sans MM, the substitution fonts used by Acrobat when a font is missing within a PDF file. Another kind of typographic chimera, in a way.

  • 2020
  • Agence Adelfo Scaranello — MBAA 2

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  • 2020
  • Agence Adelfo Scaranello — MBAA 2

This publication presents the architectural project of Adelfo Scaranello for the Musée des beaux-arts et d’archéologie de Besançon, which reopened in 2018. “From the outset, says Scaranello, one thing was clear: the convictions with which the architects Pierre Marnotte (1797- 1882) and Louis Miquel (1913-1986) had worked successively on this construction had gradually disappeared. […] Restoring the integrity of these architectures within a new project is not about historising but is a way of transforming the links between these two figures.” This 2nd volume shows the scenography of the Museum. Typeset in a modified version of GF Montserrat (OFL).
Photos by Nicolas Waltefaugle & Yohan Zerdoun. 56 p.

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