Marie Claire (French edition, 2023–)

Eighty-six years old but still looking fresh: famed French women’s magazine Marie Claire equipped itself with a new visual appearance, banking on the French typeface Cardinal.

Marie Claire was founded in 1937 by writer Marcelle Auclair and tycoon Jean Prouvost. It achieved an amazing, immediate success with up to 900,000 copies sold weekly just two years later. Fashion, beauty and a healthy lifestyle were central topics from the start, but the magazine saw its mission not only in entertaining but also in informing its readers. After a difficult phase between 1940 and 1944 when Marie Claire could only appear in the Vichy-controlled area of France, the magazine vanished together with that regime in August 1944. In the direct aftermath of World War II, Marie Claire inspired the foundation of new women’s magazines like Marie France and Elle.

Eventually Marie Claire was revived in 1954, involving the protagonists of 1937 alongside new faces and younger generations. Now a monthly with an up-to-date visual appeal, the magazine made a spectacular comeback and sold its first 500,000 copies within three days. In the 1960s and 70s, Marie Claire meandered between the conservative image of the perfect wife on one side and strong emancipatory impetus on the other, giving both sides their space within its columns. In the 1980s Marie Claire started to develop international offshoots and today there are editions in about 35 countries around the globe.

In order to give a new drive to the French edition of Marie Claire, editorial director Katell Pouliquen, in early 2023, hired Adrien Pelletier as art director to rethink the visual language of the magazine. His task was to define a new house style that would be applied to the print edition as well as to the website and social media channels. Pelletier, a graduate from London’s Royal College of Art, has a fifteen-years-long carrier path in fashion media. In this post we present the result of his redesign of the flagship itself, the printed magazine, that first saw the light of the day in September 2023. Citing Katell Pouliquen, the new design “will give our content more repercussion and will help Marie Claire to position itself even stronger as a premium magazine. More rhythm, more visual guidance, more deep breaths.”

The graphic design is characterized by large-format and full-bleed photographs, generous use of white space, and a mix of three typefaces. The serifed Lyon, designed by Kai Bernau and published by Commercial Type, is used for the reading text. Its counterpart, the sans-serif Barlow by Jeremy Tribby, can be seen in column titles, captions, and as a means of emphasis in the reading text. However, the typeface that stands out and that coins the overall visual appeal of the new Marie Claire is Cardinal, designed and published by Production Type from Paris. It is used as titling face in mid to big sizes.

Cardinal is a complex system of styles with a Classic variant whose special feature are three different lengths of ascenders and descenders to chose from: Short, Mid, and Long. The two variants in use here, though, are the condensed Cardinal Fruit and the tightly spaced Cardinal Photo, referencing photo typesetting as much as photo journalism. Pelletier commissioned Production Type to add two new styles to the light end of the latter subfamily. Cardinal Photo ExtraLight and ExtraLight Italic made their first public appearance in Marie Claire. They are now available for licensing to anyone.