Maison de la Culture d’Amiens, 2019/20 season
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 (Production Type).
Fold-out poster with PVC Dynasty (headlines), PVC Banner (categories), Media Sans (single entries).
