n°37 — A debate: Jan Van Toorn / Wim Crouwel. Author: Thierry Chancogne

Our scene is set in the Museum Fodor in Amsterdam on November 9^th, 1972. We are told that it was “smoky, noisy and crowded”, and that the gathered audience made its presence felt through “frequent shouting”. The center of this fevered arena hosted the encounter between two Graphic Designers, two graphistes, two typographers, Wim Crouwel and Jan Van Toorn, in a country where their voices carry, where their thinking is important. A meeting, a conversation, or rather a confrontation, a controversy, it has been described as a debate, one that characterizes the way in which our discipline was represented in the 1980s and that continues to echo today.

n°26 — Production process: Print on Demand. Author: Manon Bruet

Author: Manon Bruet
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
4th November 2020
ISBN: 979-10-95991-17-5
ISSN: 2558-2062

In 2008, English Graphic Designer James Goggin ran a two-day workshop with design students at the Hochschule Darmstadt in Germany. The object which resulted gradually took on the appearance of a photo album, a typeface specimen, and a color chart. On the cover, the phrase “Dear Lulu, Please try and print these line, color, pattern, format, texture and typography tests for us” is clearly addressed to the online print platform for which this book was proposed as a test.

Ten years later, the offer has become more diverse and the success of such online platforms is undeniable—indeed the phenomenon has spread well beyond the field of publishing. While some bemoan unfair competition for printers, others, professionals and amateurs, see in it a freedom to print and distribute relatively well finished objects at low cost.

The possibilities of these systems of production, are multiple but nonetheless limited, and this obviously raises the question of a possible standardization of forms and formats. However, when it comes to Print On Demand, it seems that the issue is not so much the materiality of an object (the choice of format, paper or a particular manufacture) but rather the actual existence of this object itself, outside of usual channels of production and distribution.

n°20 — A ski resort: Pierre Faucheux and Les Arcs. From the space to the sign. Author: Catherine Guiral

Author: Catherine Guiral
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
4th March 2020
ISBN: 979-10-95991-16-8
ISSN: 2558-2062

Known as “the man of a hundred million covers” and for being a major actor in the history of French Graphic Design during the Trente Glorieuses, the three decades of flourishing economic and cultural activity in France following World War II, Pierre Faucheux also had a rich activity as an architect. At the end of the 1960s, Charlotte Perriand invited him to become involved in the adventure of constructing the winter sports resort called Les Arcs. “The construction of a fantasy” designed by engineer Roger Godino, Les Arcs, a different type of Savoyard resort, would find itself embodied in a particular sign, which expresses the different instincts that Faucheux had for both the space and its transformation.

n°08 — A residency: Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé at Villa Medici. Author: Thierry Chancogne

Interview with Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé by Thierry Chancogne
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm,
07 February 2018
ISBN : 979-10-95991-05-2
ISSN : 2558-2096

Typo-topographic records

While still a student in the Ésad Valence, Coline Sunier, along with Grégory Ambos, created a striking front cover for the booklet associated with the Zak Kyes programme, Forms of Inquiry, using a series of jewels sampled from the more or less heraldic graphic patrimony of highly local emblems.

When she founded her studio with Charles Mazé, the duo continued the work of collection, which is at the same time one of the etymologies of reading, and one of the characteristics of the conceptual aesthetic of the list that emerged in the 1970s—first, in the re-casting of the Ésad Valence’s identity in 2012-2013; then in the work created during a residency at the Villa Médicis, Come vanno le cose?, dedicated to records of 1,512 graffiti found on the walls of Rome illustrating the portrait of a mysterious survivor, perhaps imagined, of the Red Brigades; and more recently in the identity developed for the Centre d’art contemporain in Brittany.

The collection of signs of power and the traces of resistance profoundly inscribed in the always political matter of the spaces is often accompanied by an attempt at typographic translation bringing to mind the work of typification in the personal writings of Fernand Baudin, created for the catalogue of the eponymous prize in 2012.