Publication accompanying the Microtopies festival in the French city of Lille and participating municipalities, organized by the WAAO Center for Architecture and Urban Planning.

From WAAO (translated):

We invite you to discover unique installations: cabins imagined by groups of architects, landscape planners and designers. These construction sites are an invitation to participate in the construction of these unique cabins and to discover the creative processes live. Each site will host activities and events. These architectural and ephemeral "micro-interventions" are designed to reconsider the place of imagination and reuse in our urban and rural landscapes. Made from recycled materials, the cabins will be the central point of activities, tours, workshops and exhibitions throughout the summer.

Designed by Julien Lelievre, the publication features two typefaces: Hauser by SM Foundry for titles and Signal by Production Type for body text.

Cover for the 2024 festival program with art by İnci Eviner

”I call ‘Whole-World’ our universe such as it changes and endures through exchange…” This line by Martiniquan poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) was chosen by the Maison de la Culture Amiens as the guiding star of a festival held annually since 2019. The term Whole-World (Tout-monde) can be understood in correspondence to Glissant’s concept of multicultural creolization in which all individuals and societies can profit from cultural exchange, leading to completely new, otherwise nonexistent cultural phenomena.

The Maison de la Culture Amiens (MCA) is the major cultural hub of that Northern-French city. It is a multi-partite house showcasing exhibitions, theater, dance, cinema and many other forms of visual and performative arts. In earlier posts we presented Julien Lelièvre’s redesign of MCA’s visual identity and his work on program brochures and advertising material.

While these are usually very colorful, Lelièvre takes a whole different approach in the design for the Festival Amiens Tout-monde. It is exclusively black and white and uses a single typeface collection: Cardinal from Production Type. Cardinal Classic is a roman of normal width but available in three different variations with regard to the length of its ascenders and descenders. Cardinal Classic Short is in use here for all reading texts. On the headline level you can see Cardinal Fruit in different weights. This branch boasts condensed proportions and an expressive italic.

In some way this reduced design concept seems to counteract the spirit of the festival whose aim it is to bring artists from around the world together and in touch with the local scene. At a second look, the omission of color can be read as an invitation to discover the actual event in full color in person. The reduction also offers a stage for the different artists and illustrators that were invited over the years to spark the crowd’s curiosity.

2024 festival teaser clip

Spread from the 2024 festival program

Spread from the 2024 festival program

Cover for the 2023 festival program with illustration Louise Druelle alias Loup Blaster

Announcement of the 2023 festival

Cover for the 2022 festival program with art by Amélie Fontaine

2022 festival teaser clip

2021 festival poster with art by Elsa Abderhamani

2020 festival poster with illustration by Zeina Abirached

Cover and back cover of the 2019 festival program with illustrations by Edmond Baudoin

Spread from the 2019 festival program

Spread from the 2019 festival program

One of the advantages of working with interesting and diverse type families is that you have a lot to choose from when you work on the same job for a couple of years. This is the case with the project featured in this post. It shows some of the promotional material for the MCA, the Maison de la Culture of Amiens in the north of France. It’s the city’s major cultural hub and a multi-partite house with an extensive program. We featured Julien Lelièvre’s redesign of the institution’s visuality as introduced in the 2018/19 season in a previous post, and have been following him over the years in order to see his ever new takes on the topic.

For the season of 2022/23, Lelièvre chose the heart as a guiding star and turned the Maison de la Culture into everyone’s home, by the French figure of speech “À la Maison”. The welcoming banners already reveal central aspects of the graphic design: clear, rectangular fields of bright colors, partly overlaid, and the typeface PVC Menu as this season’s darling. It appears in all the headlines and big reading texts. Apart from it you can see PVC Banner Ultra in MCA’s logotype and Media Sans for the smaller reading text in the program booklet. All of these typefaces were published by Production Type.

Currently, PVC is a famille nombreuse of seven, but its designer Hélène Marian is still extending it. PVC Menu is a sans serif of condensed proportions. Marian describes it as her personal take on a typical French brush lettering style which, in the 1960s, materialized in Roger Excoffon’s notorious Antique Olive. This kinship becomes evident in the vertical stroke endings, among other details. PVC Menu may be the least extreme in the family – it’s hard not to be overlooked when all your siblings are extroverts. In this season, Julien Lelièvre points us to its discrete charms, revealing that PVC Menu has a lot of personality in its own right.

The Maison de la Culture of Amiens (MCA) is the major hub for cultural events in this northern French city. MCA’s visual identity is being created by graphic designer Julien Lelièvre in collaboration with Bureau Jigsaw and type designer Jean-Baptiste Levée from Production Type. We previously showed the new visual identity that was introduced in 2018, and the iterations of the following years. This post is concerned with some of the items designed by Lelièvre for the 2021/22 season.

PVC Banner is an ultrawide sans that serves for the institution’s logotype. Together with PVC Promo and PVC Menu, it layed the foundation of the PVC family, a heterogeneous type series continually created by Hélène Marian. PVC Menu is her personal take on typical French brush lettering styles. Marian intended it as the family’s go-to style: it’s the least eccentric and most versatile one. We get to see Menu again for the 2021/22 season, where it’s used for headlines and banner text. The spiky PVC Dynasty – which debuted in the 2019/20 season – takes a break.

Instead, new this year is PVC Express. Developed out of Marian’s own sign-painting practice and specifically evolving from gift tag lettering, PVC Express translates the quick strokes made with a beveled marker into a digital font. Swift loopy gestures – a typical feat of the trade – are preserved in this aptly named style. Amidst the diverse styles, Express stands out as the most expressive and hand-like. At the same time, it integrates with its siblings through a shared x-height. To Marian, it was important to maintain the underlying PVC spirit: “not to mime or caricature the hand, but to show a typographic and digital response to questions raised by hand.”

PVC Express can be seen in use for the sweeping numbers on the posters and the giant banner on MCA’s façade. Inside the season booklets, it appears with its dynamic lowercase including the almost circular s, the looping i dot, and the attached accents. Other spreads feature its uppercase characters in extralarge sizes, allowing a closer look at the letterform construction and the stroke modulation.

Since September 2023, PVC Express is available for licensing from Production Type. Read more about the PVC family and its various members in a dedicated article.

PVC Express in mixed case

Back and front cover of the season booklet, with numerals from PVC Express

Interior spread with headline in PVC Menu and copy in the yet unreleased Text version of Media Sans

Interior spread. Page numbers and category names are set in PVC Banner

All-caps PVC Express with gradient fill

Season posters in the entrance hall

PVC Express and PVC Menu for the banner above the entrance. The logo in the bottom left corner is in PVC Banner.

The Maison de la Culture of Amiens, France, is the main cultural hub of that city for all sorts of events, from exhibitions to dance and drama. Julien Lelièvre is the graphic designer who, back in 2018, developed a new house style for this institution. Ever since he finds exciting and surprising derivations of the central theme for each season. This post is dedicated to the visual communication of the 2020/2021 season.

The cover variants of the program booklet play with the stark contrast of plain yellow and red, colors associated with danger, heat and action. The only graphic elements used are the Maison de la Culture logotype and the figures “2021”, both set in PVC Banner Ultra designed by Hélène Marian and published by Production Type. The typeface was developed with exactly this kind of use in mind: to maximally fill up the horizontal space.

Looking inside the brochure we see the way the pictures participate in the game of yellow and red: their lower half is systematically altered to a duotone look. The dividing spread “Hiver” uses a blury photograph, overdrawn with a digitally generated pattern, red on yellow.

In addition to PVC Banner, PVC Menu is used in the brochure as a titling face and the yet to be released Text version of Media Sans by Jean-Baptiste Levée in its Regular and Bold cuts for the longer reads.

Program booklet for September–December 2020, front and back cover

Program booklet for January–June 2021, front and back cover

Spread from the program booklet, with PVC Menu for headlines and Media Sans Text for the copy

Spread from the program booklet. PVC Banner is used for the page number and running title (“Danse”).

Spread from the program booklet, with PVC Banner Bold for “Hiver”

Cover of the advance program. The map marker reading “avec vous” (“with you”) features caps from Signal.

“Ouvert” – the MCA is open. The booklet with the program for spring/summer 2021 brought a change of colors, to blue and yellow.

Page from the interior with Incandescences, a play by Ahmed Madani

Page from the interior with Thélonius & Lola, a play for the whole family, staged by Zabou Breitman

Saint-Forgeot is a village in the region of Burgundy in eastern France. It is this place that Myriam Ziouche and Benjamin de Blic have chosen to cultivate vegetables and aromatic plants under the name Ferme Poliveau. On their four-hectare plot of land, the duo uses organic, open-field methods to grow pumpkins, cucumbers, tomatoes and more. In a second step, they bottle and can their soups, pickles and confitures de légumes themselves, in the pursuit of meeting the environmental challenges of our time.

Designer Julien Lelièvre provided a visual identity that is equally straightforward and striking. He found the sweet spot between minimalism and intimacy that is appropriate for the small artisan farm. The name Ferme Poliveau as well as the description “maraîchers / conserveurs” is set in capitals from PP Monument by Pangram Pangram. The typeface chosen for accompanying text – on the website and on promotional printed matter – is Media Sans by Production Type. The website, developed by Francis Josserand, uses black-and-white typography to frame the photography which provides a glimpse into the alternative farm life.

For packaging the products of the organic market gardening farm, Lelièvre added a more promotional typeface to the mix: the labels on the bottles with soups made from squash, zucchini, and cauliflower are set in Joe182, a thick marker script by Jan Horčík.

Website

Bottled squash soup in three sizes

Bottled soups made from squash, zucchini, and cauliflower

Logo lockups in the style guide

Flyers

The Maison de la Culture of Amiens (MCA) is the major hub for cultural events in this northern French city. In 2018 it equipped itself with a new visual identity described in a previous review. This post is dedicated to the means of communication that Julien Lelièvre worked out for the 2019/2020 season.

Three design principles can be discerned: graphically altered photographs, the use of vivid colors (at times plain, at times in gradients), and last but not least a set of eye-catching typefaces, all released by Production Type from Paris.

While the MCA logo lettering is set from PVC Banner Ultra, the figures “19/20” stem from PVC Dynasty. That same typeface was also used for most of the big-size headlines on posters and the chapter dividers in the program booklet. With its triangular serifs and the diagonal contrast axis, Dynasty shares some DNA with the romain Elzévir – the oldstyle roman of the French tradition – but cranks up the spikiness to eleven. The MCA 2019/20 season was one the first applications of the original serif, predating the release in Production Type’s LAB section in November 2021. The version seen here exhibits a number of differences when compared to the final version.

Both Banner and Dynasty were designed by Hélène Marian and are part of the larger display family PVC that also includes the narrow PVC Menu which you can spot in use as titling face in some of the media and as a secondary face on others. The bouquet of typefaces is rounded off with the (yet unreleased) Text version of Jean-Baptiste Levée’s Media Sans, Bold and Regular, used predominantly for texts for continuous reading.

Front and back cover of the season booklet, with Media Sans (left) and PVC Dynasty (right).

Spread from the season booklet with PVC Dynasty (left) and PVC Menu (right)

PVC Dynasty (big) and Media Sans (small)

Head and subhead in PVC Menu, text in Media Sans

Theater and opera posters, with PVC Banner (top), PVC Menu (center), and Media Sans (bottom)

Series of posters for music, dance, and circus performances

The zero (0) was not rotated by the designer, it’s the standard numeral included in the font.

“Hiver” (“winter”) uses shapes that are different from the final release, like the rectangular dot in i or the wedge-shaped flag in r.

“Printemps” (“spring”) likewise exhibits differences when compared to the retail version of PVC Dynasty: in addition to those glyphs already mention above, the bowl of P here meets the stem at 90 degrees, t has an angled top, p has symmetrical serifs, and s longer ones.

The “Ici” (“here”) map marker uses caps from Signal.

Fold-out poster with PVC Dynasty (headlines), PVC Banner (categories), Media Sans (single entries).

MCA logo lockup using PVC Banner Ultra

The city of Amiens in the north of France enjoys an excellent reputation for a number of reasons: being the ancient capital of the Picardie region, it attracts countless visitors that come for its picturesque old town with its fabulous cathedral (the biggest of France); secondly, Amiens’ name is deeply intertwined with that of Jules Verne who lived in this city from the time of his seminal Around the World in Eighty Days until his death in 1905; and last but not least, it is a very young city: close to twenty percent of its 130,000 inhabitants are students at one of roughly forty scientific facilities.

Serving as center for a catchment area of 400,000 people, Amiens also features a buzzing cultural life, and the biggest fish in this pond is the Maison de la Culture, the MCA. It is a multi-partite house staging exhibitions, movie screenings, music, drama and dance performances and provides the city’s largest theater with more than 1,000 seats. The MCA was inaugurated in 1966, following the national plan for decentralization in the field of the performing arts. It is classified a “national stage” which means that it is publicly financed, partly by the city, the region, and the national state, in order to enable an artistic production of regional as much as of national relevance. The current building is fruit of early 1990s post-modernism.

In 2018 the institution adorned itself with a new visual identity that was carried out by French graphic designer Julien Lelièvre, in collaboration with Bureau Jigsaw, Hélène Marian and Jean-Baptiste Levée, from Paris-based type foundry Production Type. Central to the overhaul was a striking typography. The new concept drew from the full arsenal of Production Type’s library.

The first and central type family that has to be mentioned here is PVC by Hélène Marian. By the time of the redesign of MCA it was just fresh from the egg. Back then, PVC came in three flavors, PVC Banner, PVC Menu and PVC Promo, which are each very different from the other. (A fourth flavor, PVC Dynasty, followed in 2021, and a fifth is in the pipeline.) What they share is the exploration of extremes in typeface design. The fonts you see the most in use in this post are Banner Ultra for the logo lettering as much as Menu and Promo for the headlines.

In the reading texts you will spot Production Type’s Media Sans and specifically its text variant which is yet to be released for general licensing. In some of the media designed for the 2018/19 season, Lelièvre recurs to further typefaces, namely the serifed Cardinal (by Jean-Baptiste Levée, Yoann Minet, and Quentin Schmerber) and the sans-serif Signal (by Emmanuel Besse).

The figures stem from PVC Menu which is also used in the yellow field. The reading text in the blue field is Media Sans and its text variant, yet to be published.

The MCA logo is in PVC Banner Ultra, with Media Sans for the address. The figures to the right are from PVC Menu, with “ICI” (“here”) in Signal.

Program and member card

PVC Menu as headline, Media Sans and its text variant below

PVC Promo

PVC Banner & PVC Promo

Exhibition poster with PVC Menu for the title

Program for the Festival Amiens Europe using Signal

Media Sans in Condensed Bold (yellow) with shadow effect, with the regular-wide Bold at the top right

Le Grand-Quevilly is a French municipality of 26,000 inhabitants in direct vicinity to Rouen, capital of Normandy. Sitting on the river Seine, the lively city disposes of bustling commerce and popular green recreational areas. Largely urbanized between 1950 and 1980, with its population tripling, Le Grand-Quevilly is today one of France’s cities with the highest quota of social housing – 67 percent.

In autumn 2021 the city first organized the POST festival in collaboration with the artists’ collective HSH Crew, founded in Rouen in the middle of the 1990s and since extending their artistic interventions to other cities across France and Europe. The POST festival is dedicated to urban art and culture and, for the second edition in spring 2022, extended its scope from hands-on graffiti workshops to hip-hop dance gatherings. The event draws its name from the venue, a former sorting station of the postal services.

The posters and other advertising materials shown here were conceived by graphic designer and photographer Julien Lelièvre who also happens to be a member of HSH Crew. The key elements of the visuals are a bold yellow color, Media Sans as typeface family, and images. For the first series the designer separated headline typography from the imagery that features graphic interventions in public spaces by Lksir, another HSH Crew member. In the second series, he filled the letterforms themselves with photography.

This works especially well with the Extra Condensed Black style of Media Sans that serves for the POST logotype. In total, Media Sans comes in five widths and five weights, plus italics. A variety of these cuts can be seen here in combined use. While they differ significantly in tonality, they all share an amazingly high x-height that results in a pronounced band effect in the lowercase characters.

In 2021, Julien Lelièvre conceived the editorial and graphic design for CAHU’s brand book. Based in Paris, CAHU (pronounced “Ca-ew”) is a line of designer bags and PVC accessories, founded by Clémence Cahu.

Except for the logotype in geometric caps, all text in the book is set in a single bold weight of Signal – and, with the exception of the credits at the end, in a single font size. The sole means of emphasis is the use of all caps for headings and titles. With this typographic restraint, Lelièvre establishes a clean and stylish look, and leaves the stage to the images. These present the products, but also provide insights into the manufacturing process and the used materials. Alternating between different sizes from full spread to single page and smaller, sometimes bleeding off the edges and sometimes with small margins, the arrangement of the photography creates a pulsating rhythm across the book.

The bilingual publication (French and English) includes texts by Lily Templeton & Joshua Phillips. Photography by Anouk Marty, Ugo Richard, Antoine And Charlie, Lara Giliberto, Jean Daniel Lorieux, Hugo Denis-Queinec, Thibault Della Gaspera, Charly Gosp, Cho Gi Seok, and Philippe Lacombe.

Signal was designed by Emmanuel Besse, with art direction by Julien Lelièvre. The font family is available from Production Type.

The Golden Age, a political epos is the title of an exhibition that took place at the Maison de la Culture in Amiens, France, in 2021. It was dedicated to the original artwork of Âge d’Or, a French graphic novel by Cyril Pedrosa and Roxanne Moreil.

The work appeared in two volumes in 2018 and 2020, respectively. On the top level, it is a fairy tale of a princess in the middle ages, largely inspired by medieval society, literature, and visual art. On a secondary level, however, it is a parable of our Western societies of the early 21st century, addressing topics such as class society, the relation between sexes, and the question how well-established societal orders can come to a change. The graphic novel was a big success in France and won several prizes.

The exhibition in Amiens was mounted in the framework of the 25th Festival de la bande dessinée. It was designed by Julien Lelièvre whose scenography allowed for an immersive delve into the artwork of the books. Spectators could learn about the genesis of the novel and find thematic points of access to the topics addressed.

From the typographic realm, Julien Lelièvre chose Media Sans, a family by Production Type first launched in 2015 and still being extended. The big typographic panels show Media Sans Extended Black in the headlines, together with the yet to be released text version of that typeface. Distinctive features that can be very well observed in this application are the extreme x-height of the lowercase letters and their almost non-existing ascenders and decenders. Eye catching!

Poster staging the Vibrants Défricheurs’ logotype, enriched with illustrations. The logotype is indeed a lettering piece based on Origin Super Condensed Black and its Backslant version. It’s playful and lively with a jumping baseline, upside-down letters and custom fancyful ligatures. Find a version without illustrations further below.

The name of this artist’s collective based in Rouen, France, is hard to translate. While everyone will understand vibrant, the verb défricher can mean to make land arable by clearing wood, but also to prepare for a bigger task, to lay ground for something.

With this in mind, one understands better the complex mission stated by the associations’ adherents, ranging from musicians to performing and visual artists to technicians and volunteers. Cross-over, improvisation and the fusion of artistic disciplines is at the very heart of their work. They aim at reaching out to the most diverse audiences with their events and are committed to their local community, organizing projects at schools and in hospitals. Apart from that, the Vibrants Défricheurs founded their own music label called Label Vibrant.

In this post you get to see various graphic design projects directed by Julien Lelièvre since 2016, from logotype to CD sleeve. What they have in common is the mix of two sans-serif typefaces released by Production Type: Origin Super Condensed, sporting a back-slanted italic, and Gemeli Micro, characterized by its pronounced inktraps.

A first glance at the leaflet presenting the association and its projects, at the print shop. Unfolded, the cover can serve as a poster.

Inside the leaflet the projects are featured. The headlines are set in Origin Super Condensed Black, the reading text uses Gemeli Micro.

Cover of the folded leaflet, using two styles of Gemeli Micro

CD sleeve for Isles, the debut album of the band YOU, published by Label Vibrant, featuring different styles of Origin Super Condensed.

Catalog presenting the projects of Les Vibrants Défricheurs, realized in two Pantone colors with a ring binding, and featuring another illustrated version of the logotype

Shown in the upper left corner is the logotype without intertwined illustrations.

As a graphic principle, the descriptive text (left) uses Origin Super Condensed for the headline and Gemini Micro for continuous reading, set left-aligned. To the right a composition made from a photograph, an illustration and large letters from Origin which are partly obscured by the imagery.

The sense of lecture is not in spreads but recto-verso: titles on the right announce the project that is described on the following left page. The tall shapes of Origin Super Condensed have been elongated even further for “YOU” – Origin Hyper Condensed?

Poster advertising a concert of Papanosh, one of the association’s projects. An illustrative chart is being inserted into the counter of the O, giving the rotated word a three-dimensional look.

Brochure for Le Percé Plafond, a project mixing sound and image projection. The artists perform in hospitals to brighten up the patients’ day. The words on the cover are arranged in various orientations around the circular die cut.

Brochure for Le Percé Plafond with a circular die cut in the front cover, revealing the illustration on the page below

Interior pages from the brochure for Le Percé Plafond, with text set in Gemeli Micro

Back cover of the brochure for Le Percé Plafond

Gigantisme is an art triennale taking place in Dunkerque, France. In the context of a collaboration with Cnap, the National Centre for Visual Arts, a selection of films from the collection of the institution was shown at the Cinéma Orson Welles in Amiens. The films programmed for Les lundis de Gigantisme all offer different representations of work, as seen through the lens of urban space.

The association between the strong presence of architecture and the toughness of our society’s relation to work needed a font that’s able to assess these aspects in its shapes and not only in the words it bears: it is Media Sans. Julien Lelièvre had the good idea to use Media Sans Extended for the design of the poster part of this leaflet. The huge red letters seem to shout a warning signal, an emergency that is still very much recognizable even with the poster folded into a leaflet. The programme on the other side is devoted to legibility, showing the diversity of Media Sans family including its upcoming Text styles.

The logo of the Cinéma Orson Welles uses PVC Banner Bold.

Every year since 2010, Rouen’s collective HSH Crew organizes a night in l'Omnia cinema, screening 8 animation shorts. Julien Lelièvre, responsible for the design of the festival since its first edition, conceived a very simple system turning a big number 8 into a pair of eyes, adding infos in a left-right-up-down fashion. Then illustrators from the crew freely turned the eyes into several characters and drawings, creating a set of illustrations to use in the event communication.

In 2017, Temeraire was chosen as the typeface for the festival communication.

For the exhibition The Wasteland at the Mona Bismarck American Center in Paris, scenographer David Lebreton and graphic designers Julien Lelièvre & Emmanuel Labard conceived a quiet reading room, putting into space the eponymous poem by T.S. Eliot.

The text is reproduced on a big veil surrounding the room but also on paper leaflets for convenient reading. It is typeset in Minotaur.

Poster, flyer, program and shirt for the 2014 edition of Mens Alors!, a cultural festival in Mens dans le Trièves, France.

Visual identity, posters and other communication material for the 2013 edition of Le mois du Film documentaire (“Month of Documentary Films”).