• 2021
  • B31

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  • 2021
  • B31

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”.

  • 2020
  • TPE — Programme

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  • 2020
  • TPE — Programme

Annual programme for the season 2020-2021 of the Théâtre Paul Éluard, in Bezons.

  • 2011
  • Ici l’Onde — Programme

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  • 2011
  • Ici l’Onde — Programme

Programme of the 2nd edition of the festival Ici l’Onde, organised by Why Note in Dijon. 32 p.

  • 2010
  • Le mur de l’école

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  • 2010
  • Le mur de l’école

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.

  • 2020
  • Garaje Wide

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  • 2020
  • Garaje Wide

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.
Available at 205TF.
Online specimen

  • 2016
  • Tardy — Typeface

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  • 2016
  • Tardy — Typeface

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

  • 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.

  • 2018
  • Kantia — Artha

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  • 2018
  • Kantia — Artha

The incessant storms of the 18th century defeated the natural defenses that were protecting the city of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. In the middle of the 19th century, Napoleon III ordered the construction of dykes in Socoa, Sainte Barbe et Artha, that have been part of the landscape since the 20th century. Nicolas Waltefaugle's photographs show the relentless fight of these constructions against the ocean. They are printed in 2 colors, matt black and a spectacular chrome ink, exclusive to Lézard graphique silkscreen workshop, which reflects light like a mirror. The series of 8 posters (5 landscape and 3 portrait formats) are available at www.kantia.eu

  • Kantia, éditeur d’images
  • 700 × 500 mm
  • Silkscreen, 2 colors
  • Lézard graphique
  • Typeface:
  • Metallic duotone Kantia
  • 2010
  • Miqi O. Untold

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  • 2010
  • Miqi O. Untold

Artwork for the 1st volume of the EP UNTOLD of my friend Miqi O. FKDB Prod.

  • 2016
  • Les 2 Scènes — Orchestre

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  • 2016
  • Les 2 Scènes — Orchestre

Posters for the season 2015-2016 of Les 2 Scènes, for the concerts of the Orchestre Victor Hugo Franche-Comté.

  • 2008
  • Théâtre musical de Besançon — Identity

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  • 2008
  • Théâtre musical de Besançon — Identity

Le Théâtre musical de Besançon (dir. Loïc Boissier) was created in 2008: it occupies Besançon Municipal Theater, an exceptional building by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. The theater is designed according to a very innovative circular plan for the time (1786), which made it possible, in Ledoux's initial project, to see the scene from everywhere. This aspect is represented in a famous engraving, “View of the Besançon Theater in an eye”. This eye and the circle are the basis of the visual identity that I designed for the Theater. To illustrate the richness and variety of its programming, an extensive color code (which covers the entire spectrum) makes it possible to identify the different registers. The character used is the Bodoni ITC, from Sumner Stone, my favorite digital revival of the typeface cut by Giambattista Bodoni in the same year as the construction of this theater. It’s been progressively replaced by my own revival, shown here in the logotype : Mononi, a mono-linear Bodoni.

  • 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.

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