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

A new and flexible visual identity for Nancy book fair, created in 1979 under the patronage of the Académie Goncourt. Typeset in a Baskerville rip-off by Claude Jacob, owned by Nancy printer Berger-Levrault since the late 18th Century, and digitized by ANRT in 2017-2018 under the name of Baskervville.

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 Condensed subfamily goes from 0703 (7 on 3 grid) to 3503 (35 on 3), and includes 145 fonts, + one variable font. Its construction allows to compose in many sizes without changing the stem weight. Specimen made with DrawBot by Rémi Forte.
Available at 205TF.
Online specimen

Ralph Rugoff, guest curator of 2015 Biennale de Lyon: “The impulse to announce a clean break from the past, to instigate a rupture with tradition, is the modernist gesture par excellence. Is it possible then, that our recurring desire to declare the end of the modern era is, in fact, merely a symptom of the modernity it aspires to bury? […] La vie moderne, the 13th edition of the Biennale de Lyon, sets out to explore this possibility. Its title unavoidably evokes echoes of earlier, and perhaps more optimistic, moments in history, but rather than its potential irony, what drew me to use this title was its ambiguity.” Invited to design the visual identity of the event, my (rejected) project was to propose an oversized identity manual, playing with the principles of modernist graphic design of the 60's. Rather than applying this guidelines to the communication, the manual itself (as an abstract of ideal uses) becomes the communication. It's, of course, typeset in Neue Haas Grotesk.

Poster and scenography of the mineralogy exhibition “Splendeurs minérales”, Musée du château des ducs de Wurtemberg, March – October 2016. The custom lettering I designed for this poster is the starting point of Minérale typeface.