Annual programme for the season 2013-2014 of the Scène nationale de Besançon.

Annual programme for the season 2012-2013 of the Scène nationale de Besançon. An image never appears alone: two are superimposed, one in blue, the other in red, which creates surprising encounters. Despite the huge diversity of the iconography, often provided by the companies, this radical treatment gives a global consistency to the series. The programme is distributed with a pair of anaglyphic glasses, to animate texts and pictures in a glimpse of an eye. 132 p.

The visual identity of the Théâtre musical was based on an eye. In June 2012, the Scène nationale de Besançon joined two theatres, the Théâtre musical (Théâtre Ledoux, which interiors are all blue) and the Théâtre de l’Espace (all red), in one single institution. To communicate on this major change, I proposed to design a new identity in two spot colors, blue and red, and use anaglyphic glasses two see what’s happening in one place or the other: it was time to use both eyes. Text appears or disappears in the blink of an eye ! In the Pre-programme for the season 2012-2013, Nicolas Waltefaugle did a photo shoot in the stage decor workshop with the whole new team. Photographs are superposed too, to create mini-animations. 40,000 anaglyphic glasses were distributed with the booklets, and we even designed some fancy pairs with Adélaïde Racca. 32 pages

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.

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

Annual programme for the Théâtre musical de Besançon. For this second season I introduced gradients, transforming the colored pads into fuzzy clouds.

Annual programme for the Théâtre musical de Besançon.

Annual programme for the Théâtre musical de Besançon. Nobody noticed, but the cover is a data visualisation of all th shows of the season, with the color code of the disciplines covered.