Annual programme for the season 2019-2020 of Les 2 Scènes, in collaboration with Jochen Gerner (illustrations). 80 p.

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

Annual programme for the Théâtre musical de Besançon. This time I completely dropped ITC Bodoni, to compose the whole programme in Mononi. Gradients appear inside the text, thanks to the wonderful stochastic print of Simon Imprimeurs.

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.

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

Newspaper of the 6th edition of the festival Émergences, a week dedicated to young creation in Besançon. 16 p.