Web poster for the Anting-Anting exhibition featuring Gothic Lab Croco.

The Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac is an arts and ethnology museum in Paris. In 2019, it changed its identity, and chose Guénola Six as new artistic director.

The identity designed by Guénola Six relies upon the idea of the exhibition as an experience for the visitor: in order to render this aspect, the identity emphasizes objects of the collections, putting them into a narration by the way these objects interact with their background and with the text. In this perspective, titles set in Production Type’s Gothic Lab play a huge part in defining the imaginary of the exhibition. Indeed, the diversity of patterns that compose the typeface family, inspired by shapes found in nature and, more specifically, in animals, brings us back to the organic textures of objects created by primitive or tribal societies. Gothic Lab is available in various styles named Croco, Elephant, Gecko, Mantis, Snake, and Tigre. Each letter becomes an object in itself, as the pattern follows and adapts to the shape of it: the heavy programming work that permitted the design of the font, supported by Ivan Murit’s thesis work on Alan Turing and stochastic rasters, is the key behind the fine adequacy of the pattern.

Even though the cultural influence of this museum calls for a stable corporate identity, Guénola Six managed to add a special touch through the daring use of Gothic Lab, telling us stories from other times and other societies.

Gothic Lab is combined with Parisine. The museum’s logo is based on FF DIN.

Poster for the Océanie exhibition featuring Gothic Tigre SD.

See more images from the Océanie campaign on the website of Guénola Six.

Web poster for Montez le son! (“Turn up the volume!”), a fundraising campaign for the restoration of the collection of musical instruments, with a wordmark starring Gothic Lab Tigre Snow. Some letters have been placed upside down, for a reversed gradient direction. The letter S is from Tigre SD.

In 1996 the Autonomous Parisian Transportation Administration (RATP) adopted the custom typeface Parisine. The development of the typeface family was part of the general effort – with Yo Kaminagai as a head of design – to unify the sign system of the Parisian metro, bus and regional express network which until then made use of different typefaces. An initial choice to rely on Neue Helvetica created disarray due to the font’s variations and difficulties to include longer station names (e.g. “Iéna Champs-Élysées – Clemenceau”, as opposed to “Iéna”).

Consequently, French type designer Jean François Porchez was commissioned to create a typeface that would be more “economical” in width. As described by Porchez in his Gazette, Parisine was:

designed from Helvetica Bold, condensed at 90%. Parisine is intentionally more open to counteract the reduction of the areas of the counters due to condensing. Its forms are softer and more round, horizontal parts are slightly heavier, optically, to compensate for the verticality accentuated by the slight narrowness of Parisine.

In August 2020 the Paris In collective raised awareness that the emblematic typography is threatened by the introduction of a different system used by Île-de-France Mobilités, the entity controlling the different transport companies of the Paris region. Their explicatory video warns of the beginning of what may be an increasing “contamination” of the standards.

[Editor’s note: Parisine was introduced in RATP’s communications in a decentralized way, and the family grew with needs and applications; see comments.]

Overview of the M4 metro line. Station names are set on an angle.

Diagram of the metro, RER, bus, and tramway lines.

Trilingual tourist map (2017) with info in French, English, and Spanish, designed by Be Dandy using Parisine’s narrow and compressed widths.

Strasbourg Saint-Denis station, July 2019.

July 16, 2018. One day after France won the Russia 2018 World Cup final football match, six metro stations were temporarily renamed. the Saint-Paul station was changed into Saint-Paul Pogba, and the Champs-Élysees station honoured the coach of the French football team, Didier Deschamps.

Sign post outside Pompadour station, 2019.

April 2020. Entry of the Plaisance Hôpital Saint-Joseph station, showing both Parisine and the famous art nouveau Paris metro signs.

RATP website, using Parisine and the same color scheme as used for the RATP signage.

Saint-Paul station fridge magnet, from the RATP merchandise shop.