Philippe Tourriol website
Contributed by Yorel Cayla on Nov 11th, 2024. Artwork published in
November 2024
.
The website for Philippe Tourriol, designed by WA75, showcases the artist’s work in both Paris, France, and Marfa, Texas.
The artist’s name is set as concrete poetry in HEX Franklin, a typeface inspired by the iconic Franklin Gothic type family. Meanwhile, the main text is set in Standard, Bryce Wilner’s interpretation of Akzidenz-Grotesk. The third font at play is a custom version of C059 Roman, a version of Century Schoolbook by URW remixed by WA75.
![<cite>Prawdziwe wyobrażenie trojga dzieci </cite>[...], Second Edition Project](https://assets.fontsinuse.com/use-media/115147/thumb/5eeb50be/@2x/jpeg/Ada%20Pawlikowska%201.webp "<cite>Prawdziwe wyobrażenie trojga dzieci </cite>[...], Second Edition Project")
2 Comments on “Philippe Tourriol website”
As the designer of the typeface I am obviously biased, but I absolutely love this use of HEX Franklin. The animated concrete-poetry layout is compelling on its own, but it’s even more cool when you consider that it’s all composed with web fonts as live, responsive, HTML text.
And because they used HEX Franklin’s “Tyght” variable font, they were able to get that nice compact letterspacing without having to mess around with tedious manual kerning adjustments for every glyph combination.
Another thing I love about this that might not be obvious to most casual observers (or, indeed, anyone but me), is that it demonstrates how the HEX Franklin Tyght font can be used with the tightest setting from its built-in variable spacing functionality in combination with standard tracking adjustments to achieve spacing where the inter-glyph clearances are very much regularized but not ridiculously tight. Type spaced in this way – with so much focus on mathematical glyph clearances – isn’t great for typical blocks of longform text, but I really love it for larger graphic-design-y settings like this. Some of my favorite uses of the original Franklin Gothic fonts use a similar technique. (I explain this multi-dimensional approach for using HEX Franklin Tyght with standard tracking on the poster I designed for Big Mess zine earlier this year.)
These are exactly the kinds of uses I made HEX Franklin for.🥰
Thanks for your comment,
We first use this font on the Basquiat Soundtracks exhibition at the Philharmonie de Paris. At that time we wanted to get a New York feel for all the different section titles.
Here for Philippe Tourriol’s website, we tried different fonts, but we rapidly ended on Franklin Hex because this font was able to achieve the perfect balance between text and aesthetic. Since the artist is also working in the United States (Marfa), we were quite happy with their American filling of the composition. As you said, thanks to the font, we didn’t play with the kerning.
By the way, I just added a tiny bit more space between the letters.