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.

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.

Wordmark for Cuillier, coffee shop in Paris. In collaboration with be-pôles Paris

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

Custom lettering for the 2008 calendar of Groupama Assicurazioni (Roma, IT), in partnership with the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici

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.

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

La Coursive is a structure based in Dijon which supports companies in the cultural and creative industries. It is located in a singular building, where passageways, between the floors, give access to the apartments located above and below. To illustrate both this principle, the facade of the building, but also the circulation of knowledge and skills within this structure, I developed an Inline version of Garaje, where the letters are open and communicate with each other. With the help of Guillaume Delamarche, intern at the studio. Unpublished

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 1st volume shows the museum empty spaces, during the construction. Typeset in a modified version of GF Montserrat (OFL).
Photos by Nicolas Waltefaugle & Yohan Zerdoun. 56 p.