Logotype and custom typeface of La Rodia, concert hall in Besançon.

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 Unpublished

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.

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.

The Métropole Rhin-Rhône area has brought together several cities between France, Switzerland and Germany, connected in 2010 by a high-speed train line. To materialize this network, a major cultural operation was imagined, utopies & innovations. Under the general curation of Laurent Gerverau, these are 12 local themes, and dozens of exhibitions that are scheduled throughout 2010, around these concepts.
It seemed difficult to illustrate these concepts with a single image: also, I preferred to propose an alphabet, which constitutes the visual identity, and ensures the link between the multiple variations. It is used to compose the logotype, which was designed when the Metropolis had only 9 cities; they were symbolized by the 9 points that appeared in the words "utopias & innovations", like 9 points on a map, network, route ... The metropolis then moved to 16 cities, but the logo remained the same.

Totema is an encrypted character, adapted from the writing of the painter Klaus Ramka, who uses it in his own publications. It's up to you to unravel the mystery.
Produced with the help of Sébastien Truchet.

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

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