Following our article about the origin of the word branding, we further develop the double meaning of cattle brands and marks.

A brand to exalt a name

In antiquity, and as early as in Egypt or in the Roman Empire, livestock (and slaves or fugitives) were marked with a cartouche symbol to signify that they belonged to a master, or to protect them from bad luck (livestock, not men).

Quality works or handicrafts were also marked with monograms indicating the names of kings and gods (or both) to whom they were dedicated. These monograms, ancestors of our signatures, were used to exalt the names of kings and Gods. They did not indicate the names of the craftsmen and artists themselves, but those of the masters who used them.
In the Middle Ages, artists and craftsmen gradually gained their freedom and henceforth signed / marked their possessions with their names, initials or monograms. This is the beginning of branding, of "marking": the affixing of a mark, sign of ownership. These markings had a triple role: to indicate a name and belonging (branding) but also to differentiate it from others (visual identity) and to sublimate it (graphic design). Aesthetics played a role; these people were artists and were not limited to simply placing their initials.

These images, taken from the book Symbols, Signs & Signets by Ernst Lehner, 1950 (fascinating!), testify to the rich aestheticism and variety of monograms and marks of blacksmiths, painters, stonemasons, merchants, horse breeders (1096 to 1105) or potters, all over the world. These abbreviations sometimes remind us of cuneiform writing or alchemy motifs.

Horse breeders on the left, and potters on the right (15-16th centuries) :

Blacksmiths (left) and craftsmen (right), 15-17th centuries:

Italian (Michelangelo, 1016) and Ductch (Van Dyck, 1018) painters 14-16th centuries:

Gothic to Renaissance masons (left) and Dutch merchants (14-15th centuries):

Pompeian (964, 965), Greek (966, 967), Roman (968 to 971), Egyptian (two lower visuals), or Byzantine (973 to 976) and early Gothic (977 to 980) stonemasons:

Medium as a constraint

We can see that depending on the culture (as on this last plate: Chinese seals on the left, -215 BC for n°949, and Japanese around the 15th century, on the right) the marks are not visually expressed in the same way, which is also due to their medium. The "logo" of a painter or a sculptor cannot be thought or realized in the same way because of the technical requirements of the material. Paper obviously leaves much more freedom and ease than stone.

Today the constraints are the same: a logo is not designed the same way depending on whether it is intended to be digital, on paper, in a very small scale (a territorial brand on a number plate for example) or in 3D in space.

A hot hyeroglyph brand

The Spaniards were the kings of branding. They used to mark their possessions with the family's coat of arms, including their cattle. At the beginning of the 16th century, the Spanish conquistadors landed in America and imported cattle by boat. They built an empire from Peru to Mexico, and fortunes were created with the breeding of the cattle, which bore the marks of their owners. Gradually, the rancheros moved North of America, to "New Mexico" (American Southwest) in Texas and California where the descendants of conquistadors employed the local population. When the Spaniards left around 1820, the land was bought back by settlers, and some Americans (Native and colonists) worked as vaqueros, or cowboys.

A cowboy in 1888

Below, illustrations of famous Hispano-American cattle brands which became ranch brands (such as Don José Tomas Talamantes, 1268, Maria Francisco Cordova, 1295, the 7U7 ranch, 1296) around 1845 and 1890 in Californie, Texas and Oregon.

Oxen, horses or sheep are hot-iron branded on their flanks, neck or rump: these are called "pyroglyphs", an invented word associating pyromaniacs and hieroglyphs. The combination of several symbols forming a new one creates a mark (on the skin of the beast, but also in the sense of branding, sign of distinction), a name, as hieroglyph cartouches. The symbols are combined in ligatures, framed, or circled.

In the beginning, brands were rather artistic, inherited from the monogram tradition of the craftsmen mentioned above, although the "animal skin" material didn't allow any fantasy or finesse and required a large basic symbol. Nevertheless, they were quickly simplified, to keep up with the increase in the number of animals and the proportional hot-iron marking rate.

A brand catalog with a syntax and corporate identity guide

With this increase, brands required a register. As their main purpose was to prevent theft, each acronym had to be known by the authorities. Using the word branding for cattle becomes proper as it comes with specifications, a graphic charter and a name and logo registration. Below are some livestock brands from the Hot Irons: Heraldry of the Range book by Oren Arnold, 1940 published in Life magazine on June 10, 1940.

Sometimes the same marking existed more than once, but in this case it had to be positioned at different places on the animals. The pyroglyphs are catalogued and registered as trademarks in "brand registrations" catalogs, then validated by officials. They make it possible to tax the owners.

For example, here are some logos found in a catalog of cattle brands in Oregon, 1975. The symbol appears on the left, the 2 circles indicate if the mark appears on the ears, followed by the names of the owners, the place and side of the mark, and whether it is a horse (H) or a cattle (C). We can see the use of a specific alphabet and titled signs.[/vc_column_text]

A visual and vocal brand

For the sake of simplicity, these brands gradually lost their artistic side to focus on the branding function, pure and minimalistic. Above all, their essence was to mark a property. Numbers and letters were then used, to which syntax was added: "feet", "wings" or degrees of inclination, in addition to patterns such as arcs, stars, hearts etc. There are few symbols but an unlimited number of possible combinations: each breeder must have his own unique code. The Manual of Brands and Marks by Manfred R Wolfenstine (1970) gathers alphabets created especially for cattle branding, which can be seen on wemadethis' website. Below, the wings and legs alphabets.

Unlike monograms which were purely aesthetic and visual, livestock branding can be read aloud like "walking Y brand", or create puns such as "too lazy to pee" (22P) depending on the symbols used. The brands can be read from left to right, top to bottom and from outside to inside (when the letters are circled or framed), which is unique in the world of branding. Actually, the ® and © signs are surely inherited from the American cattle branding codes!

Below is a page from Sending messages by John Stewing that explains the construction and pronunciation of logos. A cursive letter is read "running", legs under a letter are read "walking", an arc above a symbol is pronounced "swinging". An inverted sign is read "crazy" and a tilted one is "lazy".

Magazine Portfolio #2 by Franck Zachary under Alexey Brodovitch's artistic direction in 1950 devotes 4 pages to these hot-ironed cattle brands, which were already remarkable in the graphic world back then.

No logo and counterfeit : a matter of belonging

Those who refuse to mark their animals are called mavericks in reference to Samuel Maverick who opposed the hot-iron marking of his herd. Some claimed that he could thus steal cattle from neighboring ranches, but he said he simply didn't want his animals to suffer. Today a maverick is by extension any person who is stubborn in his desire for independence. Already at that time the no logo was a way to show a desire to belong to no one. Would this mean that non-branded animals belong to everyone, or in the opposite, have no masters?

As with consumer brands, cattle brands must be simple enough to be recognized, but complex enough not to be changed - a P into a B for example, which was very common. Counterfeiting and theft are still happening and farmers need to increase their efforts to brand their cattle. Nowadays, for example, animals can be freeze-branded with liquid nitrogen, which depigments the hair which then grows back white for life, or they use microchips or GPS.

Freeze-branding on a horse

Because in the end, the main objective of branding is to show that you own the animal that you brand. Drawing a parallel today, wearing brands on our clothes or on everyday objects, we may wonder if we have not become the herd of modern cowboys -even though we are hopefully not hot-iron branded. As we explained in our first article on the etymology of branding, it is up to corporations to communicate well in order to engage in a dialogue so as not to treat people like cattle.

Perhaps it would be better to return to the original use of branding and monogrammed logos, which consisted in sublimating an identity, to highlight its owner.

L’article Hot-iron cattle branding: brand on the skin est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

No More by John Onye Lockard

The murder of George Floyd by a white police officer was the last straw for ordinary racism in the United States. We witnessed the immediate birth of the #BLACKLIVESMATTER movement online, which led to numerous questionings of white privilege, and above all a call for awareness and action. It is in this hot context that four American brands - such as Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben's - have recently decided to get rid of logos and names imbued with racial stereotypes.

Racist branding

When reading French comments on the articles announcing these changes, one realizes that these stereotypes are not frankly understood on this side of the ocean. We can read for example: "How can "uncle ben's" be considered "racist"? Frankly, it's getting out of hand" or "We should just stop the bullshit in this country and realize that coffee grounds will always remain black no matter what we say or do." And "To the critics: what about taking a deep breath and calming down, for in the end it's just a rice brand..." Some logos are part of our everyday landscape and seem at first glance "normal" and anything but scandalous. They actually have a very heavy past and carry racist stereotypes that shouldn't even exist anymore.

The Quaker Oats brand (PepsiCo), known for its oatmeal, recently announced that it will be redesigning the packaging and brand name of Aunt Jemima instant pancake mix (not sold in France) accused of racism. Quaker said the brand is "based on a racial stereotype" and that they want to "take a step towards racial equality". A few hours later, Uncle Ben's (Mars) confirmed that they wanted to change their name and brand image, followed by Mrs Butterworth's (Conagre) syrups and Cream of Wheat (B&G). Four brands in total in just a few days, something never seen before in the branding landscape.

Let's start by taking a big step backwards and explain why.

Brand names, pure as the driven snow?

Created in 1889 by Chris Rutt and Charles Underwood, the Aunt Jemima logo is one of the oldest in the United States and one of the oldest trademarks in the world. Unfortunately, its history is far from glorious. The instant pancake powder takes its name from the song "old Aunt Jemima" by black artist Billy Kersands, in 1875, originally sung by slaves. Aunt Jemima was a hit in "minstrel shows," extremely popular racist shows to which Rutt attended, where white men with black painted faces (blackfaces) ridiculed black people.

The minstrel shows often told of the misfortunes of Rastus, a pejorative and racist name given to the effigy of Cream of Wheat, an instant cereal powder that also makes waves today. The brand claims, however, that a real person is hiding behind Rastus' face -without knowing his identity though. He was "probably the cook Franck L. White", buried without any inscription on his tombstone. Nonetheless the first advertisements -which do not appear on their website- are quite clear in terms of brand positioning:

Screen shot taken from Jim Crow Museum's presentation movie

Rastus, Cream of Wheat's effigy

And did you know that "aunt" or "uncle" (in Uncle Ben's), was a simplistic way of calling slaves without having to use the terms "madam" or "sir"? This explains why Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben's are nowadays controversial in their brand name, which is racist. Although Uncle Ben's claims to have been inspired by a famous black Texan rice farmer, Uncle Ben, and the face of Franck Brown, a famous butler, one can question the legitimacy of such a name invented in 1943 and then based on a slavery legacy.

The Mammy, trademark of racist branding

As for Aunt Jemima, she is a "mammy", a stereotype of the southern plantations' slaves, an "African mamma" whose master promises her freedom when she dies... but who never dies. Plump and joyful, submissive and happy to serve, her face and her silhouette are a symbol of wholesomeness and good health. A loving and caring mother. Her moniker and image are used as a logo on food packaging to increase sales. A real marketing strategy.

Screen shot taken from Jim Crow Museum's presentation movie and vintage ads representing Aut Jamima as a mammy

Smoothly handled branding campaign, it is necessary to bear in mind that the archetype of the Mammy was created from all sides by the Southerners and white supremacists, in order to comfort the white community regarding black slaves. Generally sexually abused, black slave women were seen as a threat for the white couples. By creating an asexual, cheerful and middle-aged caring granny, one thus skillfully stifles scandals to create a new (brand?) image that is reassuring, and perfectly false.

In 1890, the R.T. Davis Milling company -which bought Aunt Jemima from its two founders- was looking for a black woman to represent its instant pancake powder brand. Nancy Green answers the call and is hired. She's a 56-year-old former slave working in a white man's house as a cook. She becomes the first living person to embody a trademark. In 1893 her first contract consists in dressing-up and mimic a plantation slave to promote the famous pancake powder, bringing Mammy to life.

Nancy Green as Aunt Jemima

Her " friendly and cheerful personality " is used to boost the brand's sales, and earns her a medal. Nevertheless, Green's career enabled her to fight poverty in black communities and for equal rights. This video tells us more about the origin of the Aunt Jemima brand.

At that time, in the advertisements, she would be seen serving white families. She doesn't speak well, and she always has a big joyful smile (Cf: innocence, harmlessness).

Screen shot from Jim Crow Museum's presentation movie

In 1925, Quaker Oats buys the brand and registers a patent for the logo. Later, after Nancy Green's death, Aunt Jemima will be played by Aylene Lewis, Anna Robinson or Lou Blanchard in commercials and TV spots. Her image evolves, Jemima loses her slave bandana in 1968 and gets thinner over the years, to wear today earrings and a white collar.

As this article is being written, Aunt Jemima is now part of history and will no longer appear on packaging as a result of the social movements we are familiar with.

A painted black story, coated with lies

What about the lack of transparency of Mrs Butterworth's (black) syrup bottles? The parent company Conagra claims that the female shape of the bottles is supposed to represent "a loving grandmother" (that reminds me of someone) without any racial connotation. There were indeed many vintage bottles painted to illustrate a white grandmother as shown below, but sometimes Mrs Butterwort was also painted black. Gee.

But then, why choose a transparent container revealing the color of the syrup, when it is supposed to be protected from the sun in opaque bottles? The syrup being black, one can wonder. Actually, don't be mistaken, the company affirmed that the actress Thelma "Butterfly" McQueen is said to have inspired the bottles' shape. In 2009, the brand launched a big contest to guess Mrs Butterworth's first name: Joy. Funny how Joy also reminds me of someone's quality...

McQueen, who was black, strangely played the roles of maidservant in white films (such as Prissy in "Gone with the Wind", she was actually unable to attend the premiere because of the segregated theaters) from which she was never able to free herself. Scratching under the coating, one can see the striking resemblance between the syrup bottles and the Mammy figurines.

Hijacking racist packagings

In the 1960s, African-American artists decided to fight against these racist packagings and brands by creating engaged posters. In John Onye Lockard's No More, for example, we see the figure of Aunt Jemima, anything but smiling, raising her fist in revolt as a Black Panther.

L. White depicts a middle finger raised Rastus "serving this" in the racists' face.

Last but not least, during Obama's investiture, the racists were very creative. The figure of Mammy and Rastus from Cream of Wheat were hijacked featuring the face of the president. Please note the eloquent play on words consisting in changing the word wheat into buckwheat (black wheat)... accompanied by the slogan "he is ready to serve you".

Coated in myths and stories of loving grandmothers and under cover of "real people's faces", these brands convey the latent idea that all these products - which are always instant products supposed to help housewives - will offer good and loyal service to the user. Like slaves at the time, raised to the rank of "friendly effigy", after six decades of servitude. These packagings carry a form of post-slavery nostalgia, heavy and stincky, attaching black men and women to new chains: these of continuing to serve, on visual support. It is therefore high time to dust off these forms of branding.

In Europe too, racist brands...

While the news focus on the history of specific American racist brands, this topic goes far beyond the borders, leading many brands to review their history and marketing strategy. France, with its colonial history, has nothing to envy to the Americans. Let's take a look at some closer examples...

Danish ice-cream makers divided over the « Eskimos »

Mid-July, the Danish glacier Hansens Is, said it wanted to abandon the name "eskimo" for its products, considering that the term reminds the Inuit and other Arctic peoples of "a history of humiliation and unfair treatment. Aaja Chemnitz Larsen, one of the two women MPs representing Greenland in the Danish Parliament, welcomed the decision, pointing out that the term, which means "eater of raw meat" - although the etymology is subject of debate among linguists - is pejorative to many Greenlanders.

Banania, a racist branding case in France

The website Histoire-Image.org tells us that the Banania brand, created in 1914, seeks to turn its cocoa and added banana flour into a patriotic product. the brand uses the image of a hilarious Senegalese infantyman with the "Y'a bon" slogan, a basic French term to say "tastin' good".

However, this image is more than just another racist advertisement, which explains its remarkable longevity. "Negro" laughter and the expression "y'a bon" were the distinctive signs of the Banania brand until 2010. This success was for a long time due to the political necessity to minimize the participation of the riflemen in the war (and thus to avoid paying excessive war pensions!).

Assimilating them to children serves this meaning, "Africans are like children", a paternalistic and condescending vision. Thus, the brave babbling Senegalese chocolate-loving infantryman becomes the alibi for an implicit racialization of French society, which is getting used to relying on the reinforcement of soldiers or colonial workers as if it were theirs. Hence the need, affirmed as early as 1948 by Léopold Sédar Senghor in black Hosties, to "tear banana laughter to shreds on all the walls of France".

It was not until 2011 that justice demanded the withdrawal of the slogan "Y'a bon!" Since then, the brand has reviewed its image, without really erasing its fundamentals. The "Y'a bon" has discreetly transformed itself into "Le bon déjeuner... " but the childish infantryman is still there.

Bamboula makes some noise

Twenty-five years ago, the Saint-Michel brand had to remove the "Bamboula" chocolate cookies from its shelves following the "Village Bamboula" scandal, a zoo opened in Nantes the same year. It was a human zoo! The idea was to reconstruct an Ivory Coast village with "extras" in traditional dress. These "extras" had been recruited and were required by contract to be shirtless when the weather permitted ... Women as well as men, of course. An abomination that led to complaints of violation of human dignity. The controversy resulted in the removal of the Bamboula cookies and the Bamboula boy.

The name bamboula alone, however, carries a whole racist system of representation. Bamboula is a dance whose name comes from the name of a traditional drum. But by extension bamboula, in slang, has a racist connotation similar to the term "nigger". Can you believe that all the children of the 90's were lulled to the sound of Bamboula commercials?

My name is Bamboula

« Diversity washing »

Nike, Adidas, Disney, Netflix, Yorkshire Tea, Uber, Unilever... endless is the list of brands that have shown their online support for the Black Lives Matter movement. At first glance, taking a stand on this type of subject may seem necessary in order to remain aligned with the values of its customers and to reinforce the feeling of loyalty. However, most of the time, this type of approach is perceived as newsjacking, a marketing technique that consists in seizing a media subject in order to go with the flow. In the case of Black Lives Matter, we can talk about Diversity Washing, reclaiming a societal subject for commercial purposes.

But no one is fooled by the fact that most of the time it is a façade commitment, "against the flow of many of the rights violated by these multinationals": "Nike, for example, exploits Uighur workers who are persecuted by the Chinese regime (...). Amazon neglects workers' rights and the environment (...). Apple uses children to extract cobalt from mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. »

Acording to marketing specialist Mark Ritson, the anti-racist commitment of these large companies is, in any case, immediately discredited by the simple lack of diversity in their head of management. The board of directors of all these companies is utterly white. According to Ritson, brands need to sweep their own doorstep before they can make a sanctimonious speech on social networks. "Do what I say, not what I do".

Racism is typically a systemic problem that needs to be addressed relentlessly, on a daily basis, not just when a tragic event hits the headlines.

Let's be more vigilant and take a step back.

Further links:

Jim Crow Museum on afro-american racist history
Black Excellence, media on black community
If ‘Black Lives Matter’ to brands, where are your black board members? by Mark Ritson

L’article Uncle Bens’, Aunt Jemima… racist packaging rises up est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

In the beginning there were sounds, and grunts. Then then came thought, expressed with signs and articulated sounds : language. No one knows which idiom was first common to mankind, or even if there was a unique language spoken on Earth before building up into many.

A language common to mankind

Armand de Vertus made the assumption (in a book from 1868, fascinating to read) that all primitive languages are based on "lunar ideology" : the observation of the moon in all its forms, from which all vocabulary was born. The moon as starting point to human expression? Why not, and it's not so surprising when you think that it was the only landmarkt to count days, celebrations and births.

He writes in The Primitive Language based on lunar ideography: "Considering the plants that covered the earth, the stars that shone in the sky, Man's thought grew not on names, since they had none, but on forms. Men thought without words. (...) They noticed that there is no object in nature whose shape is not more or less similar to a lunar form." Few linguists believed this. Since then, they have tried to link the scriptures to geographical roots or biblical languages, forgetting to raise, perhaps, their eyes towards the sky.

In the world, some scripts are a common basis for several cultures. In China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, people use Chinese ideograms. Literary Arabic is the official language of the Quran, and brings together the Muslims of the world. Pali is used in Southeast Asia. Hieroglyphics were used in Babylon, Europe and the Middle East. And Latin was used as a reference for the literate people of the Middle Ages.

The threat of languages

With the fall of the Roman Empire, cultures and languages mixed and evolved, leading to the gradual decline of Latin as language of reference. Populations panicked, they were told that it was a divine punishment using the metaphor of the Tower of Babel. Men suddenly found themselves mumbling, babbling (Hebrew root BLBL gave "Babel") languages in which they no longer understood each other. "Seeing their foolish enterprise, God (...) stirred up discord among them by making them speak different languages, so that, thanks to this variety of idioms, they could no longer understand each other." Flavius Josephus in Jewish Antiquities (late first century).

Confusion of languages, Gustave Doré, 1866

In order not to get lost, the search for a perfect language at the origin of all the others is then pursued: the Adamic language, derived from Adam. The most pious try to find this state of harmony to get closer to God. As Umberto Eco writes in his book The Search for the Perfect Language in European Culture: "The history of European culture is sprinkled with efforts to find the language that Adam spoke with God. Either it is sought in the past, as the Original Adamic Language, (...) or in the future, trying to invent a philosophical language that would be capable of reproducing the very structures of reason".

Signs, back to the origins

Searching for the common language of Men turns into a quest for a lost utopia. Philosophers, in a humanistic approach, cling to it to express the truth, or to restore the original language of Nature. As early as the 17th century, several men set out on this quest and invented spoken languages. We will mostly remember the Volapük created in 1879 by the abbot Jean-Martin Schleyer who gathered a few hundreds of speakers in the end of the 19th, and the Esperanto in 1887 which is still used today.

Among the first men, "all objects having a lunar shape could be used as letters, signs to write, to manifest one's thought without speech, or in conjunction with speech". De Vertus thought that originally the writing systems were signs, drawings, symbols, recalling various shapes of the moon, and written with wood, bones, or in the sand, before evolving into writings. Wanting to find a universal language therefore means plunging back into the origin of human thought, going back to nature. As Vertus wrote, "the knowledge of the first signs, their translation into sounds, is the key to hieroglyphics that contain (...) the true history or rather the photography of the first ideas formulated by mankind "

Pasigraphies, scripts readable in all idioms

As sign comes before scripts, we're intereted here by visual languages, aka pasigraphies, which go beyond languages because they do not need to be pronounced but simply understood. We owe the term pasigraphy (from the Greek πᾶς, everything, and γραφή, writing) to Joseph de Maximieux who invented it in 1797. It is a term used to define visual scripts readable in any idiom. These symbols are used primarily to communicate, and not to speak. We told you about yerkish a short while ago, used to communicate with the great apes. Here are some others.

1 - Egyptian hieroglyphics, ~3000 BC: language of Gods

These symbols are not exactly a universal language, because Champollion was able to associate a pronunciation to them, and thus understand that a sign did not simply or solely translate an idea. Composed of figurative characters, they are halfway between a pasigraphy and a writing, and are therefore perfect to introduce this series. Basically, hieroglyph means sacred engraving in Greek. The Egyptians called them medouneter, divine words. It is a language derived from the Gods. They were nevertheless used for more than 3000 years until the Roman period, evolving towards a cursive writing, the Demotic, before disappearing and giving way to Greek.
There are three types of hieroglyphs: ideograms, sign-words that designate an object, an action. The phonograms which correspond to a sound, and the silent signs which determine the lexical field of the word. Here is an excerpt from the famous Rosetta Stone, and below is the table defined by Champollion to translate it into Greek (click on the images to see them in full size).

Taken from Egyptian description, 1809

Jean-François Champollion, Letter to M. Dacier, 1822

2 - I-Ching (Yi-King, Yi-Jing), 1000 BC : language of nature and mathematics

If hieroglyphics could convey thoughts while being used as a script, the Yi-Jing is used to convey a thought, but not to communicate. It is therefore not a pasigraphy either, but the process is very interesting and has strongly inspired those in search of a universal language.

The Yi-Jing is a cornerstone of Chinese culture, the oldest text know, based on 5000 years of wisdom. It gathers 64 hexagrams and their explanations, nature-oriented, which are used during divinations. In his 19th century translation Charles de Harlez made the following explanation: "Yih-king is both a book of divination and a treasure of scientific wealth. All the principles of all sciences -natural, ontological, psychological, moral, etc.- are contained in it, condensed; it is only a matter of finding them. Unfortunately these treasures are covered by such thick veils that one may lift a corner but not unveil or completely unravel these mysteries". This book is for insiders only, and, like hyeroglyphs, you need a key to grasp its meaning. Its is known as "the book of Changes (transformations, or mutations, depending on the translation). Leibniz (discussed below), who was very keen on it, saw it as "the first formulation of binary arithmetic" based on 0 and 1, as Wikipedia explains.

Yi-ching is a system of thought based on the yin-yang binarity divided in a systematic way, which describes all the changing states of the world, indicating the path of Tao. Mathematically structured, it is based on the observation of nature. Each major yin & yang element is written in a trigram (three lines) composed of solid yang elements —, and separated yin elements – – and endowed with a Chinese character to name it: heaven, lake, fire, thunder, wind, water, mountain and earth. These graphic elements combine to form 64 hexagrams (of 6 lines) called koua.

Yi-ching diagram sent by Joachim Bouvet to G.W. Leibniz on which the latter wrote down figures

Although simple in appearance, this language is difficult to grasp because of its translation and interpretation. Charles de Harlez explains how complex the Chinese language is, because "any sentence can, in general, due to the multiple meaning of words, be understood in different ways". The 1st koua generally translated by the term "sky" actually has the primary meaning of "the force that produces all movement, which generates, then sets, keeps in motion all beings, and leads them to their completion." We are far from the "sky"!

This oracle is still used today.

3 - Didascalocophus by Geroge Dalgarmo, 1680 : body language

George Dalgarno created a hand language for the deaf and dumb: the Didascalocophus. The idea is that the hand is divided so that each phalanx or area of the hand is associated with a letter designated with the opposite hand. For example, vowels with the fingers, consonants with the thumb, double consonants with 4 fingers together, or the nail against the skin. It is not a visual or graphic language as such, but a universal method to communicate with hands. The American Sign Language is derived from it.

4 - The Universal Characteristic by Leibniz, 1666 : language of reason

Leibniz, mentioned above, aims to create a universal and symbolic language that can translate any rational thinking: philosophy, mathematics, science, an exchange of ideas... His goal is to develop a form of calculation, an algebra, to consolidate reasoning. His language, which never came to fruition, was supposed to be able to be used with the calculus rationator, a computational machine based on an algorithm. He explains that "it could be, at the same time, a universal way of language or writing, but infinitely different from all those that have been projected so far; for characters and words themselves would direct reason; and errors, except for factual ones, would be only errors of calculation. It would be very difficult to form or invent this language or characteristic."

5 - Idéography (Begriffsschrift) by Gottlob Frege, 1848 - 1925 : language of pure thought

Following him, Gottlob Frege takes up and develops Leibniz's theory to bring it to life. He thus creates the Ideography, or Begriffsschrift in German. It is a "language expressing pure thought initiated by the language of arithmetic" as its creator explains. The language works with affirmations, contradictions, equivalences etc. which make the thought (expressed by letters) evolve. You can consult the book on gallica, but you will need to speak German to understand something. The Ideography is not a spoken language either, but a system of pure reason. A language of the matrix, in short.

6 - Le Bliss language de Charles Bliss, 1949 : langage universel

Charles Bliss, known as Mr Symbol Man, is the inventor of the most successful universal language to date. Created in 1942 but published in 1949 under the name of semantography, Bliss language is a simple visual language that can be used and understood by everyone. It is based on symbols that create concepts in logograms. For example, we create the word lion with the symbols animal + claws (= feline) + hair, or the word language (spoken) with the symbols ear + mouth. You can even find a graphic chart to learn how to write it well.

Charles Bliss spoke 6 languages as a child and realized as he grew up that no one really succeeded in creating a universal language as Leibniz wanted. Pacifist and humanist, he stressed that "the different languages are one of the greatest obstacles to the understanding of men", and wished to "help mankind" to understand each other. He then created a series of 50 basic symbols, figurative and simple, which he associated with a grammar, to form thousands more. You can consult or search for words on the blissonline website.

extract from Mr Symbol Man movie

He explains in the video: "Many teachers have asked me, how many hundreds or thousands of signs and symbols have you invented? And I answered, only 50, to which I added 30 international symbols such as numbers. And I combine them into thousands and thousands of expressions. Here are the simplest: mouth, eye, ear, nose, nose + mouth = taste, hand. Here is the action symbol, a cone of erupting volcano. And when I put the action symbol on the mouth, it reads talk. On the eye; see, observe. (On the ear) hear, listen. (On the nose) feel. And (on the hand) touch.

The book Mr Symbol Man explains the basics of this universal language, and the assembly of pictograms:

The Bliss language is a simple way to translate and illustrate concepts into images. Each ideogram defines the word, verb, or expression it symbolizes: for example toilet is a chair over water, and bathroom is a room with water. Therefore, to speak Bliss, you need to know the definition or meaning of the word you are using, a bit like when you play pictionary. For example, water lily is represented with the symbols flower + water. If the language is conceived on the basis of English logic, which is precisely very descriptive, it seems simple enough to be used in many cultures. On the other hand, the same word may have a different definition and therefore meaning, resulting in variable writing in different countries. In many places, for example, there is no chair in the toilet, but a simple hole. This is one example among many...

This language is one of the few to be practised nowadays. It is used a lot in hospitals (in the United States) to help people, both children and adults, who have lost their ability to speak.

Evolutive, it adapts to its time. An unofficial update has been done to create ideograms for COVID-19.

7 - Néosignes by Maximilien Vox, 1950 : heart language

Maximilien Vox develops the neosignes in 1950. This universal language will not succeed and will not be developed to its fullest. It works with a system of accented signs.

8 - Pasigraphie by Jean Effel, 1968 : one idiom for all

Jean Effel, almost at the same time, invented pasigraphy, with his Avant-projet pour une écriture universelle (Preliminary Draft for an universal writing). It is an ideographic writing "competitor" of the neosigns which picks its symbols from many languages: mathematical, metrological (measurements), typographic, but also comics, astronomy, medicine, the Michelin guide... It will not come to fruition either, for lack of means considering the scope of such a task. Effel, like Bliss and Leibniz before him, wanted to overcome the limits of language, which is harmful to human understanding and peace. He wanted to build a language that everyone could translate into their own language, accessible to the deaf and dumb, as a stepping stone to literacy, or as an aid to translation. You can consult his book at the Diderot library of Lyon, of which here are some extracts.

9 - The Universal Telematic Code by Cartier & Breton, 1987: pictographic language

Between code and language, the boundary is thin. The code is not used for writing, yet it conveys a message through symbols.

Language is not always written on paper. The digital age brought new needs, for an international clientele. Michel Cartier and Roger Breton used the same Effel approach to develop their Universal Telematic Code, which applies to the field of computer telecommunications (the Minitel for example). As Cartier explains, "the idea is to offer a signage code based on ideograms capable of combining with each other to provide users with intelligible messages". This language is a heritage "from the Egyptian, Chinese and Christian systems; it recovers the heraldic code and various sign systems," explains Gérard Blanchard.

At the time, it should be pointed out that the computer acronyms were mostly derived from the English language, an international standard. Cartier is Canadian, and wishes to develop a more neutral system. It is, according to Blanchard (A universal code for telematics) "a visual communication with a common universal language and not coming from a foreign language, English, not dependent on another culture". More than 400 symbols are thus created, like a lexicon.

Spoken language, drawn language, mystical language... In their search for the universal language, Leibniz and his disciples may have attempted to create the impossible. The universal language, if it should transcribe the pure thought of the human being in its multiplicity, is perhaps meant to remain elusive. From the language of pure reason invented by Frege arises a reasoning, a system, while Bliss' language, which seems more accessible, is based on a logic which is not universal and varies with cultures.
In the end, the divinatory or sacred symbols of the Egyptians and Chinese, figurative but poetic, may be a solutionof a universal language that leaves enough room for intuition and guided interpretation for this thought. Or should we look up to the moon again, to find our common roots?

L’article Creating a universal language est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

Bizarre as well as strange, the Unicode language aims at gathering and preserving writings... by unifying them with a code system. If the idea is far-fetched, it is nevertheless beautiful and useful. On closer inspection, the method is not so standardized; it couldn't be done without the hand of man, and meets cultures' resistance.

Numbers and letters

In the wonderful world of computers, signs and characters are represented with 0 and 1. These binary-coded numbers formalize writings in the memory of the device to transcribe them on the screen.

The great revolution of the numeric keyboard, unlike its ancestor the typewriter, is that it is not limited to the characters written on the keys. On a computer, it is possible to switch the keyboard from AZERTY to QWERTY by clicking on a button, or to create new characters using several keys, such as "•" with alt + @ or "œ" with alt + o for example. The numeric character is therefore not limited to a single key. The numeric coded language thus offers unlimited possibilities.

Houston, we've got a problem

Since the 1960s, the ASCII code, American Standard Code for Information Interchange, has been used in most cases. Invented by our American friends, it is based - logically - on their alphabet. ASCII offers 95 printable characters, numbers from 0 to 9, and mathematical and punctuation symbols. Check it out :

Minor problem: this system is only suitable for English speakers because it is not adapted to other special characters in other languages such as œ or ç in French or ä, ü, ß in German. It neglects non-alphabetic scripts such as Chinese, Hindi or Osmanya to name only 3. It is then difficult to write beautiful sentences such as: à Noël où un zéphyr haï me vêt de glaçons würmiens, je dîne d’exquis rôtis de bœuf à l’aÿ d’âge mûr, & cætera. Oh dear, what a pity.

Another limitation, but not the least, is that ASCII character encoding is unfortunately limited in its use since several characters can have the same code. Depending on the messaging systems or websites used, completely different characters or hollowed-out rectangles may appear (they are called "tofu" because of their resemblance with... tofu). This still happens today, even though Unicode has been around for 30 years.
One can imagine that there must have been some small problems when an electronic notes indicated a "monetary sign" and that it varied from country to country instead of remaining faithful to the original value. A reader in the United States would then read an amount in $ and his British counterpart would see it in £. Ha, the limits of globalization...

Standardizing scripts with Unicode?

To make it simple and not too geeky, Unicode was invented to overcome these problems. Created in 1991, this computer standard brought together the most notable private and public partners in the field of information technology. Its aim is to code, represent and process any glyph in any language and on any medium or software. And thus to use easily any type of writing on a digital support, such as ⵉ  ढ़ ڞ ぽ ༇ ꠚ 🌴 𑀙 𒋞 ꐀ which you can find on unicodepedia.

Unicode aims to harmonize writings using codes, in a square format. Today there are around 150 000 signs (143,859 to be exact) from 154 writings, and 3304 emoticons, visible on decodeunicode or the official Unicode site (which is more technical and less visual) or on unicode-table, which classifies alphabets or emojis. Since the boom of smartphones, in 2014, Unicode is updated every year with new characters, mainly emoticons.

Creating an emoji

If you feel like it, you can easily create and submit an emoji (a Breton flag for example would be very useful #emojiBZH). What, here's a fondue emoji since 2020! We found the example of the emoji lama creation folder proposed in 2017 in which it says that the emoticon would be very useful to make puns in Spanish (what's your name is written como te llamas, and llamas also means lama). A Twitter user wrote in 2015 that he "hated the world for not having an emoji lama", provoking 5,800 likes and 2,700 shares. The emoji was added in 2018 under the code U+1F999. Phew.
We still can't find a penis emoji (which is a symbol often used in the world) so; oblivion or censorship? We have got our little idea.

The role of Unicode is not only to standardize writing and make it readable everywhere, but also to digitize characters from dead or little spoken languages to preserve them. It' s a bit like a huge library of the world's linguistic heritage. It took no less than 27 years to fully create the 146 existing scripts! This represents a colossal amount of research and creation work.

From cultural design to standardized design

In a publication by developers working on Unicode in Stanford in 1993, it reads that the original idea was to develop a harmonization of typographic rendering, to avoid text distortions or surprises (such as tofu) in multilingual documents, or to have mathematical signs and letters of different weights in the text. In reality, this is much more complicated than you might think. The epic thing about this Unicode writing system - which is meant to be standardized - is that the typographic work to create the glyphs is actually done by hand (digitally). The writing is not yet automated! On the other hand, it must comply with precise specifications to frame this creation.

Lucida Sans for Latin languages

Unicode meets standards and rules in its realization, validated by a technical committee. When Unicode was created in 91, the Lucida Sans typography was chosen as a basis to develop the characters. It is a modern typography but easily resonates with the handwritten style. The choice was made to use a sans serif, with a neutral style, which is simpler and purer than a serif.

Sans serif typefaces reach the essence of the typeface and make it possible to better distinguish the glyphs from each other, without parasitic embellishments. They also have less cultural-historical background. This is where we see the full scope of such research work and the questions raised by such a design project.

The Lucida Sans Console was created in response to the problems associated with digital word processing, including the risk of overlapping capital accents on top lines of text, or poor character reading. The Console is thus a monospace (it has the same spacing in the width for each letter), with a noticeable difference between the heights of upper and lower case letters, or finer accents on upper case letters. For the typographers who read us, it is based on Lucida Sans Unicode and Lucida Sans Typewriter.

But if it is almost easy to decline Latin languages thanks to a basic typography, it is much more complicated to tackle other characters (oriental for example) or ideograms (of Asian languages for example).

Ethnological and linguistic work for non-Latin languages

In non-Latin languages, a character (letter defined by a code) does not give only one glyph (sign, representative drawing). That is to say that one letter can correspond to several glyphs variations. For example, for the Arabic alphabet, most letters have 4 glyphs depending on whether it is written at the beginning, in the middle, used alone or at the end of a word.
In Latin language, in Unicode, the letter has a different code depending on whether it is upper-case -A- or lower-case -a-, because it is visually different, such as -c- or -ç- for example. On the other hand, an italic a or a bold a will have the same code: Unicode considers the shape, not the allographs (variants of the same glyph). It is therefore sometimes necessary to design several glyphs for non-latin characters. We show below an example with the letter "veh" ( ۋ in Arabic), declined according to its 4 forms.

Moreover, if we continue on the logic of standardized characters, then the Chinese, Korean and Japanese ideograms -which are initially the same- should be able to correspond to these 3 languages. A bit like the Latin alphabet which is suitable for writing Spanish, French or English (except for a few signs or accents). But the culture cannot be standardized so easily. The cultural variations of each country are such that ideograms actually give different scripts in China, Korea and Japan depending on whether one writes with hanzi, hanji or kanji characters. To design such signs, called CJK in Unicode, for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, it is therefore imperative to collaborate with local designers and merge them with existing local typographies.

In addition, rare or extinct languages require an enormous amount of research work. Concrete examples will be given in the next section below. Designers working on glyphs, most of which are manuscripts, do a real job as linguists and ethnologists. It is necessary to look into the creation of new design rules, to understand character tracings, to take into account legibility, variable initial forms. For the typographer, it is a question of understanding the hand, the eye and the brain of his predecessors. The shape of the letter is a living idea to be transcribed, very difficult to standardize.

And where humans shine with their creative genius, unlike the machine, and where we thought we had standardized everything, we are constantly discovering writings that are exceptions to the rule and are still very confusing to code. Moreover, man even continues to invent new writings (in Kenya for example, the Luo was created in 2009)!

Un Unicode pour les rassembler tous

The Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) is a research project aimed at coding letters from ethnic minorities or dead languages in order to bring them into the digital age. This promotes education in these native languages and breaks down computer barriers. For dead languages, it facilitates online research and education.

Based on this research, the Missing Script Project (MSP) proposed a Unicode glyph for each of the missing alphabets, mostly the character A. The MSP site, the World Writing Systems, strives to gather all the writings and digital systems of the world, extinct or still spoken today. There are a total of 292 human writing systems, half of which are not yet listed in Unicode. Below, vai, latin, cuneiform, lisu, ancient persian, ol chiki, bamum, and ideograms from languages from the 4 corners of the globe.

This research and typographic work was conducted jointly by the Atelier National de Recherche Typographique de Nancy, the Institut Designlabor Gutenberg in Germany, and the Script Encoding Initiative at UC Berkley in the United States.

It took 18 months to propose 146 main glyphs for these 146 missing alphabets, and the creation of 66 different typographies. Here are a few of them:

Johannes Bergerhausen and Morgane Pierson, who worked on the missing scripts project, say that this work of harmonizing the scripts is far from simple. First of all, they analyzed and cross-referenced different sources to identify the letters, and had them validated by writing specialists. Then, the signs often vary according to dialects, regions or simply the handwriting of the person who wrote them. Since Unicode is standardized in its rendering, it is sometimes necessary to modify the appearance or proportions of the signs to fit into the imaginary square that serves as a standard. An elongated sign must thus be shortened, to "not poke out".

This is what the researchers explain in a conference about the missing scripts project on YouTube, a capture of which is shown below. On the left, the patterns from the engravings, on the right the unicode symbol proposals.

We understand here the work of harmonization of the sign based on the different existing scripts.

This board shows the feedback from writing specialists, who help researchers defining the right Unicode glyph.

And to end on a high note, here is a graphic overview of all the languages of the world, living and dead. This silk-screen printed poster is available for sale on the world writing system.

To go further on this momentum of cultural but standardized typographies, we also talked about Google's Noto (no tofu) typeface in our article about the typeface of the future. The latter is a typographic project that consists in digitally designing in Unicode little spoken or even dead languages, and making them alive not only on stones but on screens. Less complete than the MSP, it converges towards the same desire to preserve the world's writings system.

L’article Unicode wants to save scripts by standardizing them est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

Pioneers of colour photography

Many specialists had of course preceded them in this crazy race launched two centuries earlier. Newton in 1666 affirmed that light breaks down into a spectrum of several colours, and then Maxwell in 1861 proposed a first photograph based on Thomas Young's theory of trichromatic vision showing that the 3 primary colours allow all colours to be recomposed. Later in 1896, the gelatin tinting process was invented in France, for example, and improved by the Pathé films around 1926. Other manual colour photography processes were developed, such as toning (involving a chemical reaction with an emulsion and a silver plate), hand colouring or the Pathécolour stencil, which were very time-consuming and varied from one image to another, but were widely used for the first colour films.

Because we find it beautiful and exciting, here are some examples of techniques developed to create colour photographs.

We can see for example tinting from Pathé (1926). The visuals below are taken from the fantastic site filmcolors.org which records the evolution of photography and colour movie. Chemical dyes were used to bind to the gelatin in the silver film when they were soaked in acid baths. This gave different tones that gave the images a special atmosphere. For example, green was used for outdoor scenes, blue for maritime scenes, etc.

Here, some tinting and toning techniques. The bands on the right are from a 1923 expedition to the North Pole. Toning involved a chemical reaction converting the silver image with colored metal compounds, such as iron ferrocyanide (Prussian blue) for blue, or copper ferrocyanide for red/brown. Dyeing and toning processes were sometimes combined.

Iridescences of the film can be seen below in the photo of the ship, due to the metallic compounds of the toner :

One of the preferred methods for color photography was hand-coloring, as early as 1895. This process, inherited from the magic lanterns, was much used in animations of the time, such as here Annabelle's butterfly dance (1897). Below, excerpts from La poule aux œufs d'or, in colored stencil coloré (1905), and the Excursion to the Moon of 1908.

Seeing life in autochrome

In 1907, after 7 years of research, Louis Lumière set up the Autochrome, photographic plates and paper "allowing the direct acquisition of object photography with their colours". It was the first device to reach the public. Easy to use but expensive, it remained on the market until 1930. The process used potato starch tinted with the 3 primary colours and randomly dispersed on a photosensitive plate. This random nature also gave a random rendering of the colour coating. 12 years before, in 1895, the Lumières brothers had invented the cinematograph (in black and white), a device that projected images onto a screen, thus giving life to cinema. Here are some pictures taken with the autochrome around the 1920s (below, a picture of Lyon).

Dufaycolor sees more clearly

One year later, Louis Dufay filed the patent for the dioptichrome plate, which he developed in the 1930s under the name Dufaycolor, or Versicolor. The dioptichrome plate allows a very faithful colour rendering, thanks to a complex grid of several lines of primary and mixed colours (red, blue, green, blue-violet and orange) interlaced in a grid pattern.

A bit like today's four-colour metro posters, the result looked far away or small on a photo because the screen was extremely fine, but the coloured squares appeared as you got closer, a bit like a pointillist painting. The screen was tinted on the film in several stages, tint after tint, faded and then superimposed in a grid at particular angles. An extremely complicated and lengthy process, but effective. Here are a few shots from the 1940s, including two from London after the Second World War, as well as an advertisement for Dufaycolour films.

The invention will be commercialized in the 10's, but the market is unfortunately already saturated by the Lumière brothers and will not have the expected success.

Saved by the English

The regularity of the screen, which left no room for randomness, however, allowed a much better colour rendition for the photographs but also for the cinematograph, which was then making its debut in the colour process. Let us recall that the process - which has not frankly changed today - was a succession of several images projected to the second, like multiple photographs. Dufay then launched himself into this breach, hoping to have more luck than in photography.

The advantage is that the frames were directly embedded in the films, and there was no need for specialized equipment. With projection, the screen was not as sharp and required a lot of light, and this technology did not hit the mark in France either. On the other hand, it will be much more used by the British, who bought the patent. This marked the beginning of glory for Dufay.

The British Post Office, the GPO, even offers itself a Dufaycolor advertising film to promote its services: "a colour box". The General Post Office called upon the artist Len Lye, a pioneer in the creation of colour films, painting directly on the film. The film (the advertisement!) made a big sensation at the time because it was in colour, and accompanied by dynamic and dancing music. Here is a combination of 3 of Len Lye's works:

Technicolor would then win the market after the Second World War, with the success we known, and Dufaycolor disappeared in the 1950s.

All this to specify that Louis Dufay, our dear Frenchman, invented in 1930 a unique printing process giving the paper an animated aspect: the heliophore. We've written an article about this amazing kinetic paper.

L’article The colour photography rush est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

L’article Heliophore, the animated paper est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

L’article We ❤️ Milton Glaser ! est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

Reza Abedini, graphic designer in Iran: a job, a legacy

To be a designer like Reza Abedini in a country like Iran is to carry within and recreate a 3000 years old extraordinary artistic, visual and calligraphic heritage. To follow the footsteps of an extremely rich history, that of an immense Empire that once became the artistic foundation of all surrounding civilizations. The kingdom of Persia has influenced not only Arab but also Western, Asian and African societies in the fields of architecture, sculpture, visual arts, writing and manual techniques.
Despite being torn apart by conquests, wars and enriched by various cultures, Iran has nevertheless distinguished itself from the Arab world developing its own language (Farsi) and culture, making it a singular country. As in other Muslim countries, it made great use of calligraphic art, of which arabesques and illuminations were used to sublimate the Koran, the sacred text.

Beaming on the world during antiquity, open to the West in the 1960s and then reclusive during the Islamic revolution of 1979, the country has gone through more or less favourable periods to visual expression. Despite the bad image conveyed in the media, Iran is nonetheless a high place of graphic design, recognized on the international scene, and full of talent.

Father of the post-revolutionary creation

Reza Abedini is the leading figure of the second generation of Iranian designers, post-Islamic Revolution (1979), from the 1990s onwards. Born in 1967, he trains, teaches and transmits his knowledge inherited from the first Iranian graphic designers who were trained in Fine Arts and Western graphic design, like Morteza Momayez before him. Far from creating in a closed-door environment, despite the political context, his work is recognized internationally, and seeks to perpetuate a Persian style and culture.

Posters from the book Reza Abedini - Design&Designer #26

A member of the International Graphic Alliance and the Iranian Graphic Designer Society, he has been teaching at the Fine Arts Department of Tehran University (the 4th largest in the world) since 1996, in parallel with his work as a freelance graphic designer in the cultural field. In Iran, fine arts and graphic design are intimately linked. And because he is a renowned professor and graphic designer, the majority of contemporary Iranian graphic designers have been influenced and trained by Reza Abedini himself. He is thus THE leading figure of the post-revolution following Morteza Moyamez before him (figure of the pre-revolution).

In perpetual research, "he gradually abandoned the inherited codes from the previous generation, to establish his own stylistic language elements. A style determined by the techniques and their limits, silkscreen printing, its large screens, and perhaps also its dull colours on tinted, kraft paper", underlines Alain Le Quernec in the issue of design&designer (Pyramid editions) devoted to the Iranian graphic designer.
In this BBC excerpt that we have condensed, we can see Reza playing with letters as well as with pictures. Stylized handwritten lettering is indeed considered as a visual discipline and an image in its own. It has today a major place in all forms of Iranian artistic expression, which Reza Abedini was able to reinvent.

As we stated in our article on the genius of Iranian graphic design, "the art of calligraphy is still considered to be the most accomplished of the Applied Arts of Islam, and is widely used in Iranian graphic design. (...) It is a major element, even supplanting the visual (whereas it is mostly the opposite in our culture). Words and images intermingle to become one, letters become illustrations. One cannot grasp the meaning of Iranian graphic design without considering the importance of the text for this culture."

Willing to assert a contemporary Persian graphic design, Reza Abedini is passionate about typography and Persian letters and draws fonts in Farsi alphabet. Without being purely calligraphic, his work is resolutely modern, while remaining in line with Iranian artistic codes. He thus mixes the codes of contemporary art and Persian calligraphy to create what he calls "persianity". Indeed, it must be made clear that typography as we know it in the West has nothing to do with Iranian typography.

A typo-calli-graphic work: letters as images

In Western typefaces, typography gives energy to the letter; a meaning, a sensibility, an essence, from the designer to the user. The same sensitivity that was lost in the shift from hand to machine, from calligraphy to typography. However, due to their characteristic forms, Persian letters are imbued with an energy of their own, from which they are indissociable. They are almost always calligraphic, handmade. Before Reza Abedini, Farsi was not (or very rarely) digitized, and lithography was a very widely used medium for making posters or advertising supports, as these letters were almost impossible to type. Reza Abedini also asserts that "Iranian typography does not exist as such" (extract from Roshanak Keyghobadi's essay What is Typography? January 2015). If we want to make a pun, we could then speak here of typo-calli-graphy, in its primary Greek sense: the art of writing beautiful graphic characters.

Persian typography design requires the designer to work hard to create not only letters but also multiple type combinations with each other, depending on their placement in the word. For, as in the Arabic language, letters merge to create new ones. The Iranian designer Sina Fakour, whom we met in Lyon and who shared with us some graphic resources about Iran, also completed his memoir on "Arabic writing, from manuscript to digital" (project 9/28). This typographical difficulty can be better understood with the image of Fakour's work below, which shows that depending on its position in the word, the letter will be visually different (click on the image to enlarge).

Similarly here, Sina Fakour uses and rearranges the letters of the word "vote" to create new words: "yes" and "companionship". A pun impossible to grasp in European culture, often seeing only the beauty of a folklore.

He gets this idea from this calligraphic heritage, just like Reza Abedini. The particularity of Persian typography, in contrast to Western typography, lies in the fact that it sublimates and combines this inherent energy and brings its aesthetic criteria to life, as Saed Meshki explains in his essay "What is typography?". (what is typography) (2004).

It is almost impossible for us to grasp all its nuances and references, but we can nevertheless appreciate its composition, colours, patterns and arabesques.

Posters from the book Reza Abedini - Design&Designer #26

Reza Abedini's work has been rewarded many times, notably for the best film poster in Iran, or at the Chaumont poster festival. He has also received awards at poster biennials in Mexico, Iran, Hong Kong...

Posters from the book Reza Abedini - Design&Designer #26

If you want to learn more about Iranian design, its origins and current representations, we recommend you to read our article on the genius of Iranian graphic design!

L’article Reza Abedini, father of iranian contemporary graphic design est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

When we discover this type of images, we tell ourselves that our naive little brain is playing another trick on us. What magic is behind this masquerade? Someone's trying to trick us!

It often starts with Marilyn Monroe. Looking at the image from several meters away, we are positive, it is indeed Marilyn. But, a few seconds later, by bringing our gaze closer, this judgement is to be reviewed and Albert Einstein seems to be laughing at us!

We are going to tell you how these images are fascinating, and how they can help us to better understand our "gaze".

Visuospatial resonance

The visual phenomenon behind hybrid images is called "visuospatial resonance". We are in the field of neuroscience, and the first discoveries date back to the 1970s. The question was to understand how the brain analyzes an image.

On the one hand there are the visual stimuli provided by the eyes, and on the other hand there is the memory of the observer. In concrete terms, everything happens in less than 0.1 seconds. Yet it is a relatively laborious iterative process of comparison, which starts with a rough vision then detail after detail will be able to arrive at the precise interpretation of the object looked at.

Obviously, a quality view will be a big advantage. I can guarantee that without glasses, you will not recognize much in less than 0.15 sec. To qualify the sharpness of the image, we talk about frequency. High-frequency images will be images with very sharp edges, with little detail. We see them very well up close, but after a few meters they disappear in our eyes. Conversely, low-frequency images will appear blurred at close range, but sharp from a distance. It is by combining these two images (cf: resonance) that we can produce these famous hybrid images.

But why does the eye work this way? I, who thought our brain was a lazy one, why does it take care to look at two visuospatial areas at the same time? Couldn't it have found a more economical way?

The eye: "Hello brain, I'm sending you an HD picture, I don't know what it is, but figure it out..."

The brain: "Ok, wait 30 seconds, it's downloading..."

The eye: "Go ahead and hurry ! Maybe it's a tiger !"

The brain: "Hey easy, I'm still 56kpbs... OK, it's OK, it's a cat!"

You will have understood it, this dialogue is pure fiction, and any resemblance with a scene that has already existed would only be fortuitous. But there's a lot of truth in this exchange. In fact, if all the information were to pass between the eye and the brain at once, we would have big problems of cognitive saturation. To do this, nature has given us two receiving channels, each with a different bit rate.

That's where the iterations begin. The low frequencies are sent to the brain very quickly, to get the first feedback. This "coarse" visual information would allow a first recognition of the information. You can experience these "low frequencies" yourself, since they are the "blurred" areas at the edges of our field of vision. When the tiger surreptitiously enters your living room, when it sneaks in between the TV and the sofa while you were concentrated on reading this article, it is the low frequencies that will save your life, even before you saw that it was a cat. At that point, the stopwatch is at about .08 seconds.

The brain: "Go ahead and raise your head, I'm not sure that the moving red spot isn't a tiger! I'd like to check."

At this point, the brain can then ask the eye to look more closely. The whole body is on alert. The high frequencies will come into play to confirm or reject the coarse image recognition.

The brain: "Can we stop the stopwatch? Would I like to know my performance?"

There's nothing to be afraid of, it was a cat. The stopwatch reads 0.15 seconds.

Making hybrid images

From this research in neuroscience came the hybrid images. The principle is to mix two images, one in low frequencies and the other in high frequencies. We owe this visual innovation to the MIT laboratory and researcher Aude Olivia. You can find her scientific publication at this address.

If you want to have fun making this type of images, the process is quite simple. In Photoshop, import your two images. Put the first one in "Gaussian Blur" mode and pass a "high-pass" filter to the second one. Here is a source file if you want to have fun. Don't hesitate to send us a link to your creations in the comments.

Who's hiding in these pictures?

We propose you a little game.
Will you recognize which celebrities are hidden in these pictures?

Feel free to place the screen away from your eyes. You can also squint.
Scroll through the pictures to discover the original images.

More images can be found on the instagram account @Hybrid_images.

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Test your available brain time

In the example of the tiger cat, we observed the mechanism for recognizing an image by iterations. Let's put this mechanism into practice with a funny little test. Below, you have two images, an "H" composed of small "H's" and another "H" composed of small "O's". But wait a few more seconds before looking at these images. The goal of the game is to observe what your eyes will do. Pay attention, because everything happens in 0.15 seconds for the first image and a little more time for the second image.

In the first image, the low-frequency stimulus sends a first information to the brain (see: a big H). The second high-frequency stimulus confirms that these are small H's. High and low frequencies send two pieces of information that will be conceptually "congruent" to the brain.

In the second image, the low-frequency stimulus is the same (cf: a big H), but the high-frequency stimulus sends back "non-congruent" information (cf: small O). The brain will then ask for verification... and hop, the eye will look again to check what is happening. The reading time of the image is doubled, even tripled.

So, first we have a global vision (Cf: low frequencies) then a local vision (Cf: high frequencies). Knowing that we don't have two eyes for nothing, each eye will specialize for a different mission, always to save time. For most people, it is the right eye that looks at the details, and the left eye that looks at the global picture. Of course each eye has both abilities, the proof, if you close your left eye, you will always see the cat jumping on you.

By replicating this experience under brain imaging, neuroscientists were able to measure which side of the brain was active (or not), and they were able to confirm that the left brain is predisposed to details and the right is more prone to the global. This confirmed the first intuitions acquired in the 1960s, when the first neuroscientists observed the impact of brain accidents on their patients (e.g. So-and-so understood vocabulary, but not puns, etc.). The left hemisphere of the brain is the seat of cold and concrete logic (Cf: high frequencies), while the right hemisphere is more oriented towards imagination and emotions (Cf: low frequencies). Seen through these blurred "H", all this seems logical!

In the image above, we can see that the process can be used very well with typography. One could easily imagine signage processes playing with this principle. Imagine, from a distance you read an information "A", then as you get closer the information changes to become "B".

The secret of the Mona Lisa's smile

The incredible Leonardo da Vinci, without knowing it, had already manipulated this principle of "visuospatial resonance". Everyone knows the Mona Lisa and her famous smile. Endless expert discussions have focused on this enigma: "Is the Mona Lisa smiling?".

The Italian maestro used a characteristic Renaissance technique called sfumato. It consists of tiny layers of glaze mixed with subtle pigments. When you look directly at the Mona Lisa's smile, it seems to disappear. But when you look at the background, then you can see a smile on the Madonna's face.

These are simply two superimposed images, one "blurred" (low frequency) representing a smile, while the "sharp" image is less smiling. So, when our gaze changes, for example by looking at the small, sharp details in the background, then the perception of the smile changes. The mystery of the Mona Lisa's smile would have waited 500 years to be unravelled!

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The art of double images

While these hybrid images are the result of recent scientific research, the art of "double images" is older. We are obviously not talking about the notion of the "double meaning" of an image that goes back to time immemorial, but simply about these optical illusions.

In the 1890s, Charles Allan Gilbert produced an impressive work entitled "All is Vanity". It shows a young woman looking at herself in a mirror, but as she stands back, a vanity (skull) appears. Many years later, Dior resumed this process for the advertising of its perfume "Poison".

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Another famous painting from the 1940's is Salvador Dali's "Slave Market". The bust of Voltaire hides there among a group of characters. Always according to the distance of our gaze, this or that part of the image appears.

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An ecology of the gaze?

With these various research projects, straddling art and science, we have a better understanding of how our eyes work. Like any science, this can be used to manipulate images even more efficiently and thus force our eyes to look at them for even longer. Advertising loves this kind of use.

Conversely, these techniques can also be used to produce images that are more economical in "brain time" in a form of cognitive ecology. In an increasingly complex world, it seems to us essential to produce fewer images, but better thought-out images that inform the eye in a benevolent way, and that distribute the information at the right time, in the right place.

Sources :

http://www.medecine.ups-tlse.fr/du_diu/fichiers/ametepe/Article%20Cerveau%20droit.pdf

http://docplayer.fr/66955638-Emotion-et-espace-visuel-approches-neuromagnetique-neurosomatique-et-comportementale.html

L’article The Art and Science of Hybrid Images est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

Graphic design in Iran

A little while ago now, we started a series of articles entitled "Graphic design around the world". The idea was to take a look at other graphic design cultures, to travel to meet colleagues, to discover the history of graphic design in their countries. It is indirectly about questioning globalization, standardization and the conditions of exercise of our profession.

The first country we explored was Turkey. Today, we are taking a leap of faith to visit the genius of Iranian graphic design. We are talking about a genius here, for his extraordinary creative faculties, and by analogy with the genius of the lamp: endowed with great power, who only asks to be freed from his chains to shine.

It is certain that the recent international tensions are not for nothing in our desire to meet Persian design. Faced with the American embargo and the terrifying idea of yet another war, it seems essential to us to go and meet the other, its culture, its history. And what an incredible story that is the history of Iranian art and design!

We will of course add our sincere thoughts to the Iranian people, also heavily affected by the Coronavirus. May this article give them a modest reason for optimism and pride in these troubled times. For our part, we have taken great pleasure in travelling through the graphic history of their country. Thank you to all the designers who expand the boundaries, even if they are only imaginary. 

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The work of a designer or artist in Iran today cannot be understood without context. This context is that of a country that is magnificently rich in the arts, and so special in the world. Once a Persian Empire, Iran has been crossed and nourished by countless cultures and civilizations. It has distinguished itself around radiant artistic faculties and a distinct language. Contrary to what one might think, Iran is not an Arab country, and has more cultural affinities with India.

In turn influencing the world during antiquity, open to the West in the 1960s, then reclusive during the Islamic revolution of 1979 before opening up timidly again, the country has gone through more or less dark and propitious times for visual expression. In spite of the bad image conveyed in the media related to current events, Iran is nonetheless a high place of artistic and graphic creation, recognized on the international scene, and full of talent.

Before delving into contemporary Iranian graphic design, we must therefore understand its history.

A 3000 year old visual heritage

Brewed by conquests and civilizations that have shaped the world's largest empire and the tales of the 1001 Nights, Persia and Iran have been nourished by cultural crossbreeding to become one of the most artistically prosperous countries in the world. This can be seen in the quality and diversity of the arts that have endured over the centuries and are the foundation of our societies today. The miniatures, those minute, richly detailed paintings, Tazhîb illuminations, poems, ceramics, enamelling, engraving and tapestry that take up traditional motifs are an integral part of Iranian culture.

An article written at the end of the 1950s on the occasion of the second Tehran Biennale boasts of the Persian heritage and its influence: "Historians no longer ignore the fact that Romanesque sculptors in Europe were inspired by Sassanian bas-reliefs, that Chinese artists did not remain insensitive to Iranian interlacing and decorative forms, that our miniatures taught the world the perfection of lines and clarity of colour, and that our art played a role as an intermediary between artistic currents from the farthest reaches of the Eastern world to the farthest reaches of the Western world. "

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The Achaemenid Empire, the first great Persian empire and the largest empire in the ancient world, extended in the 5th century BC from Greece to Egypt to the outskirts of India and China. It was divided and segmented under Alexander the Great, then expanded again during the Sassanid Empire (around 220 AD). Its fame is such that it culturally influences and shapes the arts, architecture, culture or writing of the surrounding civilizations: Rome and Byzantium, Western Europe, Africa, China and India.

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Let's stop for a few seconds on Alexander the Great. We are in the 3rd century BC. His dream of merging the Greek and "Eastern" civilizations will lead to the development of the Hellenistic civilization (Cf: the Western civilization). The role of art in Politics and Society began with him, and in particular with the development of portraiture. In order to control an empire that required several weeks of travel on horseback to cross it, Alexander entrusted artists with the task of producing innumerable representations of him, frescoes, mosaics, sculptures... and especially money. He will be the first monarch to strike coins in his effigy in his lifetime!  All these representations embodied power in the physical absence of the king. Before him, gods were sculpted to embody divine power. This strategy of omniscient presence and incarnation of power will certainly facilitate the mastery of the immense territories conquered by Alexander. In contemporary terms, one could almost speak of the invention of "branding" or at least "personal branding" by Alexander the Great.

Portraits of Alexander have crossed the centuries, and are still today a great success with politicians, some busts still adorn the Senate Gallery in Paris for example. The image becomes a tool of power. A large part of the western visual tradition will come from Alexander the Great.

Alexander the Great's dream of the union of East and West will come to an end a few centuries after his death with the arrival of the Sassanid Empire. And the eastern Persian tradition will regain its rights in Iran. But Alexander the Great still remains a hero in Iran, and the Iranians refuse to see him as a conqueror. From our point of view, 23 centuries later, it seems important to us to remember that there are bridges in history that can bring East and West closer together. Long live the bridges!

Text as image

The text also has a big say in this visual baggage. When the Prophet Muhammad recites the Koran, the sacred text of Islam, a huge work of memorization through writing will be done. As Iranian researcher and graphic designer Sina Fakour explains, "between the eighth and eighteenth centuries, before the appearance of the printing press, the number of handwritten books in countries using the Arabic alphabet was unprecedented and uncountable. Today, more than 3 million manuscript books from this period are preserved in libraries and institutes".

Based on the Koran, the Muslim religion produces a large number of miniatures depicting characters. Little by little, the representations of faces in pious texts disappear and are left empty. The words of the Koran are then used as a pretext for particularly devoted ornaments. Illumination and calligraphy thus sublimated the sacred words in the early books, with gold, ink and paper sets. So much so that the art of calligraphy is still considered to be the most accomplished of the applied arts of Islam, and is widely used in Iranian graphic design.

Below are some excerpts from Shahnâmah, the Book of Kings, calligraphed by Firdawsî in 1616. Also some calligraphy excerpts from the Koran, between 1300 and 1500.

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In line with these traditions, the text is very often stylised even today, and is an integral part of the graphic composition. It is a major element, even supplanting the visual (whereas it is mostly the opposite in our culture). Words and images intermingle to become one, the letters become illustrations. One cannot grasp the meaning of Iranian graphic design without taking into account the importance of the text for this culture.

Below is an overview of the calligraphic work of the Iranian designer and visual artist, Parastou Forouhar. Born in 1962 in Iran, she has been living in Germany since 1991: her parents were murdered in Iran because they were considered opponents of the regime, and she currently lives in exile. Her work is a criticism of the Iranian government, and she also questions the notion of identity and women's rights.

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In this series of drawings, Forouhar composes with his art of calligraphy the names of animals in Farsi (Persian). She compares the ambiguity that surrounds the question of whether we are looking at an image or a text to the feelings of belonging and strangeness she felt when she was labelled as "the Iranian" by her German colleagues. The elegance and visual simplicity of the drawings beautifully capture the act of trying to communicate in another language and across cultures. This attempt is traced with simple things and the combination of non-verbal and written modes of communication, to convey not only meaning but also feelings.

The last image is a work of meaningless letters drawn on a sacred Hindu cow, which carries these letters harmoniously, to illustrate the two great religions that are tearing Indian society apart.

Typography and printing

At the same time, Arabic typography -mechanical, unlike its calligraphic, manual cousin- took much longer to develop than in the West. For good reason; the Latin alphabet takes the letter as a unit, whereas it is the word as a whole that counts in Arabic and Persian writing. Moreover, we would like to point out that the Persian (or Farsi) language uses the Arabic alphabet, but is not an Arabic language. It is spoken in Iran, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq among others, but by three times fewer speakers than Arabic. Farsi once had its own alphabet, until the British banned its use in the 18th century. The word Farsi comes from the Persian word / parsi, but the letter P does not exist in the Arabic alphabet, so the word Farsi was chosen.

Iran has almost always used lithography to print its texts, even in the age of printing and digital technology; that's how much the Persian language is coming up against this technology. The first to tackle Iranian typography in the aspect of letters as forms was Reza Abedini, to whom we devote a separate article in our History of Graphic Design section.

The first lithographic printing press arrived in Iran in 1821, just two years after the technology was introduced to the United States. By drawing on a stone, this medium allows artists to manually compose motifs, caricatures and calligraphy without the constraints of typography or layout, and at a lower cost than conventional printing. The first book was printed 11 years later - in lithography - and many European publications were translated in the wake, in a move towards modernisation and openness to the world. Newspapers will then use this technology.

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The first graphic designers

Contemporary graphic design was born in Tehran at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1941, Tehran University offered a section dedicated to Fine Arts, with specialized courses in graphic art and design. The Ministry of Culture and Arts later developed a Decorative Arts section, inspired by the National School of Fine Arts in Paris. Bauhaus and applied arts are taught there. Iranian students thus have a path that begins with fine arts before leading them to graphic design, such as Morteza Momayez, and Reza Abedini after him.

Morteza Momayez and some of his contemporaries in the 1960s (Guity Novin, Farshid Mesghali, or Ghobad Shiva) constitute the first generation of Iranian graphic designers.

Trained Western-style in an extremely rich culture, they refuse to give in to the blackmail of purely mercantile and advertising orders, and create their own visual grammar. And this despite the fact that the majority of private clients are satisfied with plagiarism in European or American styles. Curious, informed, also inspired by the great graphic currents of the West, in technical and creative research, their practice is centred on the analysis and presentation of visual solutions to a communication problem. Many magazines or progressive cultural institutions - such as Kanoon, which organized festivals to promote children's books and animated films - allow them to freely create creative visual supports, and are financed by the Shah's regime.

Below is the work of Ghobad Shiva:

At the time, these designers were true pioneers. With their own style, they tried to make people understand that design, even if it is representation, does not hide the essence of things. Luckily, Iranians, and therefore many of their clients, are educated and sensitive to art, and graphic design is considered an art in its own right. The first graphic exhibition in Tehran took place in 1964, and the first Biennale of Asian Art was held in the Iranian capital in 1978.

Momayez studied and worked in Iran in the 1950s and then trained at the Arts Déco school in Paris in the early 1970s. He then teaches the discipline in Tehran, and presides over the society of graphic designers at the origin of many biennials and local and international exhibitions. Influenced by the Polish poster, the cultural richness of his country and his studies in France, he plays an indispensable role in the local graphic scene. Moyamez is the first Iranian to become a member of the International Graphic Alliance. Here are some of his posters from the 1970s.

 

A rare and therefore notable fact, a woman manages to make a name for herself in this closed and almost exclusively male universe: Guity Novin. Hired at the Ministry of Culture and Arts, she is nevertheless confronted with the refusal of the director of the graphic arts department, who would prefer her to be a secretary. New wave filmmaker Hajir Darioush then offered her a position in the film department. There she designed the visual material for the first Tehran International Film Festival.

Women have contributed in their own way and for centuries to the development of Iranian arts and culture, firstly through "feminine" textile-related activities such as weaving. Today, more than half of university graduates and artists and designers in Iran are women.

They are graphic designers, creators, lecturers, lead international workshops or run art and design galleries. Today we can mention the graphic work of Homa Delvaray, Zeynab Izadyar, or Mahsa Gholinejad of Studio Tehran, among others. We show some of them below.

The Islamic Revolution and Censorship of the Arts

But in 1979 everything changes. The Islamic revolution deposed the Shah and established a strict Islam and a ban on the arts, which were considered heretical. You have to read Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi to understand: goodbye Abba, the Nike and Michael Jackson, goodbye Western culture! Many artists -including Novin- are fleeing Iran. Two years earlier, however, Empress Farah Pahlavi had inaugurated the TMoCA (Teheran Museum of Contemporary Art), a unique museum in the Middle East inspired by the Guggenheim, with the largest collection of contemporary art in Iran and the largest outside Europe and the United States.

Warhol, Moore, Dali, Chagall, Lichtenstein or Raushenberg, judged anti-Islamic or pornographic, are stored in a basement for 20 years, until the first post-revolutionary exhibition in 99. In spite of a more or less variable tolerance, the current regime still lets these works sleep most of the time in the shadows while waiting, one day, for new hours of glory...

Coming out of the shadows

During the revolution, artists in exile created from their host countries and sometimes returned to their home countries in the 1990s. Others like Morteza Momayez contribute to maintaining and developing the creativity of his country in isolation despite the revolution and then the Iran-Iraq war.

For if the context is a problem, the designer's role is precisely to find a solution to the problems; whether they are erected by the client... or the government. Such conservative constraints then allow designers and artists to juggle with the limits of protest art. The post-revolution and post-war period, encompassing the years 90s-2000, heralds the birth of a new generation of graphic designers, in which designers seek to enhance their country's heritage while creating a modern language.

Reza Abedini is the leading figure of this second movement. He teaches or has taught at Tehran's Fine Arts, Azad University (the 4th largest in the world) and the Fine Arts section of Tehran University, thus training the third generation of Iranian designers. We have devoted a biography to him in our History of Graphic Design section which we invite you to discover.

It is important to note that the majority of the graphic achievements in Iran are related to the field of culture. As for the first generation of graphic designers, the other fields unfortunately show little interest in the matter.

The revival of Iranian graphic design

Iran's immense cultural heritage is a strong force, and its bubbling youth continues to modernize and play with these traditions. "Iranian designers have the immense privilege of being born into a 3,000-year-old civilization. The sources of inspiration are almost inexhaustible, but this heritage sometimes tends to limit innovative ideas; it is a huge challenge to create something new that is shaped by so much history" explains graphic designer and illustrator Behrouz Hariri. The challenge today is to put the cursor in the right place.

With the rise of the Internet, Iranian designers have been able to enter into dialogue and exchange ideas and concepts with the rest of the world. In the same way, this openness has helped to show the true face of Iran: dynamic, cultured, curious and creative, which goes against the media. The young designers, born after the Islamic revolution, took pride in working in Farsi. Some unfortunately prefer to turn to the West and globalized standards in order to shine on the international scene. The older generation does not fail to remind them not to forget their roots.

It is impossible to talk about the work of all the renowned graphic designers in Iran, but we have selected a few. To begin with, here is an overview of the work of three women graphic designers in Iran.

Homa Delvaray was a student of Reza Abedini. She lives and works in Iran, mostly on local artistic and cultural projects, but also receives commissions from clients in Europe and the United States. Her graphic work has been shown internationally and has been awarded many times. These first 6 posters were made around 2005...

...the next six, around 2015:

Aria Kasaei, founder of Studio Kargah, collaborated with Reza in setting up a series of posters to promote the Azad Gallery's bi-weekly exhibitions. This project has helped to spread the influence of graphic design in Iran among public and private cultural organizations. It has had a huge impact on poster design in the Middle East and has enabled them to make their mark on the international graphic and art scene.

Zeynab Izadyar worked in Reza Abedini's graphic design studio. She made these posters in 2007 for visual arts festivals.

She is now a clothing designer and launched her vvorkvvorkvvork brand in 2017 from the United States. She mixes artisanal techniques inherited from her country of origin (such as natural dyeing, calligraphy or Persian motifs) with a contemporary vision of clothing.

 

Other artists are grouped in studios, such as StudioTehran, which is very active on Instagram.

Mehdi Saeedi is also part of this new generation of prominent Iranian designers, although he now works in the United States. He helped develop the principles of calligraphy applied to typography, and is working on zoomorphism with Persian characters. In this sense, he has developed a course entitled "the melody of letters".

 

To go further: There would be hundreds of other designers and artists to introduce you, but due to lack of space and an already well-stocked article, we invite you to discover Sina Fakour, Studio Melli, Masoud Morgan, Studio Metaphor, Mojtaba Adibi, Studio Tehran, Studio Kargah...

Geniuses come out of their lamps

One could logically believe that in such a context of censorship, graphic art - or art in general - would have difficulties to be born or to exist. And yet the opposite is true; art is a form of resistance, of memory, of duty. Muzzled by censorship but not paralyzed, like geniuses taken out of their lamps without being freed, artists and graphic designers cunningly perform in places kept secret until the last minute. Despite the wars and the political context, Iran is in the midst of change and offers an extremely fertile breeding ground for creation.

Tehran is home to many internationally renowned galleries and the Iranian art scene is far from being buried. Although the latter subsist without aid, sponsors, networks or foundations! Resourcefulness and mutual support between designer-geniuses reign supreme, and art market speculation - bracing and solid - is on the rise in this society with an uncertain economy. We can only continue to hope that graphic design and this creative energy will survive the current events, freeing its talents and creativity for good.

Some sources to go further:
gdiran.blogspot.com
www.telerama.fr
Larousse : art et archéologie en Iran
Larousse : Histoire de l'Iran
Book : Arabesque, Graphic Design from the Arab World and Persia

Many thanks to Sina Fakour for proofreading and contacts!

L’article The genius of Iranian graphic design est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

The movement did not wait for the Forum on Domestic Violence to put the names of feminicide victims on the walls of some twenty French cities. These collages impose themselves on us through a graphic system as simple as it is powerful, while the messages are designed to highlight these dramas and awaken consciences.

This long article will cover many aspects related to this social movement. We will obviously talk about feminism and patriarchy, then we will look at how this movement managed to impose its messages in the public space and the role of its "graphic charter". Then, after a short detour through May 68, we will try to understand how the "branding of a social movement" differs from the "classic branding of brands".

Make yourself comfortable and start Fip radio so you won't be bothered by the commercials while you're reading!

Bref, installez-vous bien confortablement et lancez Fip radio pour ne pas être dérangé par la publicité pendant votre lecture ! (Public radio deserves a little publicity!)

Translating : "What do you want for Christmas ? Mum alive ! "

Father Christmas is a garbage

Let's start the article with this picture taken next to the desk last December. Street feminicide vs. Boulevard theater? When political and commercial messages unintentionally (or not!) collide. The anti-feminicide punch-line seems specially designed to resonate with the poster of the play "Le Père Noël est une ordure" a very famous French play. We believe that relying on the surrounding messages to reinforce its purpose is a genius of communication.

This image allows us to introduce, through the figure of " Father Christmas ", the notion of patriarchy, an inescapable notion in this subject of feminicidal collages!

The absurd inscription "feminism kills" on a feminicidal collage "our blood on your walls"

Patriarchy, from passion to hate...

As the weekly magazine named "1" writes, "Until recently there was talk of 'crime of passion': a man killed his wife, he loved her too much. (...) Then there was talk of "battered women" in the 1970s (...). Since then, feminist associations have been using the term "feminicide" to mark the intolerable nature of these crimes. This expression qualifies "the murder of women by men, because they are women". The idea is to underline the misogyny of the act and its hatred, in the same way as one would underline racist crimes, for example. Witch hunts, marital murders, dowry crimes are considered feminicides. We have to wait until 2015 for the word to enter the dictionary!

According to Ivan Jablonka, a professor of contemporary history specializing in violence against women, "feminicide is the bloody failure of patriarchy" which relegates women to maternal or subordinate responsibilities, and this only because of their biological system (uterus, breast) that allows them to give birth. As for the man, he grants himself the rest of the powers in the other external spheres (social, professional, political, economic...) Women are, men do. Patriarchy is therefore a set of symbolic violence, in general, and leading to physical violence, as in the case of feminicide.

In France, many people would think that we are far from the worst, that our society is not strictly speaking patriarchal, that women are free. This is not entirely true. And that is the problem. Feminicide is unacceptable and despicable, regardless of the cultural and social context. Patriarchy is so deeply rooted in our subconscious that it makes us believe that certain behaviours are natural, when they are purely constructed.

The writer Virginie Despentes also provides an interesting additional reading on the subject of patriarchy, recalling in "King-Kong Theory" that while women have always been victims of male violence, men too have always been the "cannon fodder" for the powerful, and that today this violence is still perpetuated through capitalism. In her view, patriarchy could only be achieved through the fight against capitalism. In a less virulent way, historian Silvia Federici, in her book "Caliban and the Witch", tells us how, in her opinion, capitalism organized itself to make slavery and the annihilation of women a necessity for the accumulation of wealth. We already knew this, but yes, "everything is political".

To delve deeper into these notions, and to understand how our societies have come to this point, we invite you to read the supplement at the end of the article.

Big words and big remedies

According to the count of the Collectif de Recensement des Féminicides Conjugaux en France, at the time of writing this article, 150 women in France have perished at the hands of a man they knew (companion, ex, relative...). On average, in the country of human rights, a woman dies at the hands of her companion every 48 hours.

It is in this all too murderous or enslaving context that Marguerite Stern, an ex-Femen, decides to take action: "we no longer want to count our dead" she says. On August 30, 2019, she gathers women via her instagram account to paste messages in the streets of Paris: the "feminicidal collages". She wants to obtain concrete measures and funds from the government. Forty women answered the call. The movement has multiplied today.

The idea is to name and pay homage to the women who died at the hands of their companions by describing the facts as they are: sordid, but very real. Going out at night among women to reappropriate the public space, mostly held by men, "makes you proud, makes you strong" as one activist explains. The movement gets organized and spreads on Instagram on the accounts @collages_feminicides_(name of the city) that everyone can join in order to participate in a militant night-time collage.

The graphic identity of the collages

The technique is simple: use white sheets and cover them with black letters using a large brush. Placarded at night by militant, concerned, empathetic or simply curious women, the texts and the technique are the same all over the territory.

An extremely simple, coherent and sober visual system, but above all, within everyone's reach, and with almost zero resources. No need for a printer, stickers or flyers to convey it. The rules to be followed do not take away the spontaneity of the gesture, and the display is recognizable everywhere despite the random nature of the handwriting. The D system inherent to this type of action imposes its style.

This is a magnificent example of a graphic charter where the letter size is standardized in A4 size and the font is a monospace. The pages are glued in a well aligned way according to the imposed grid. The main color will be 100% black and the background must be white.  It is exactly as in any organization, a minimum of common rules must be respected, otherwise the impact of the collective action will be immediately diluted.

Marguerite nous donne d'ailleurs un guide de "charte graphique" complet en story sur son compte instagram :

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Outlaw collages, but not too much...

Let us observe some legal aspects related to these actions of "civil disobedience". Indeed, the Penal Code provides for different degrees of condemnation. It starts with 3750€ of fines when the damage is "light" as in the case of collages. The penalty can be increased to 7,500 euros in fines for "direct provocation to rebellion [...] by posted or distributed writings" (article 433-10).

We suspect here that the choice of the pasted messages is not innocent, since none of them will explicitly incite rebellion, merely recalling facts or figures.

The use of paper (which eventually peels off) thus makes it possible to circumvent the law a little, and at least not to be in pure vandalism that would damage the walls. Vandalism is heavily punished, with fines of up to 30,000 euros and two years in prison. To date, the few glue-gluers arrested have, to our knowledge, only received reminders of the law.

Photos : @collages_feministes_paris et Ludovic Marin

Olympus of Gouges and the multicoloured posters

It's hard to avoid Olympe de Gouges talking about anti-feminicide collage. During the French Revolution, the pioneer of feminism was the first woman to use posters to spread her ideas. At that time, these types of posters were called "placards" and were mainly used to publicize official notices, alongside notices printed on the walls by opponents of royal power. Only the royal power had the authorization to print on white paper. Coloured paper was reserved for other types of posters. Olympe de Gouges was no exception to the rule. This royal law will be included in 1881 in the famous law on freedom of the press, only to be officially abolished in 2004!

From this heritage, graphic designers all know unconsciously what will or will not make the institutional character of a graphic creation. And therefore, the State's graphic charter recently designed by the French government services, and imposing a large place on the white background (Posters, site headers...) is part of this logical continuity. White is order and power!

The Legacy of May '68

Visually, the collages are halfway between manifestos and protest slogans, inherited from the posters and graffiti of May 68. Writing on the walls is the primary expression of the angry people. Or of the people in general. And it's not new, we found graffiti on the walls of Pompeii!

In 68, creative workshops were set up in the schools of Fine Arts (the popular workshop) and then Arts Déco, which produced craft posters to support the movement in progress, through an "active strike". Some are purely visual, others textual. The students print on newsprint from the striking printing works. The posters are not designed to last, but to illustrate the excitement and urgency of the moment. The stencil screen printing technique, which was first used in France, was used to print quickly and extensively (in the United States, it was Andy Warhol's favourite technique). They are simple, quick to reproduce, and inexpensive.

Poster artists are not professionals, they are young students who feel the world. This visual and creative system will become a visual and graphic legacy and will be used at events. The same technique of free and protestant postering was used in the United States in 1970, to denounce - among other things - the Vietnam war, or the inequalities towards blacks (with the slogan I AM A MAN, in Memphis in 1968).

A short typographical interlude to tell you about the graphic designer Tré Seals, who is dedicated to digitizing the lettering on social protest posters in order to bring them back to life. From the women's suffrage movement in Argentina to the civil rights movement in America with the famous "I Am a man". We invite you to discover his work onr www.vocaltype.co.

Strike and demand by black garbage collectors and workers in Memphis, United States, 1968.

These are the messages of a suffering people, a minority that claims its existence, and expresses itself in the simplest possible way. And that is their strength: to denounce with one voice, without colourful fantasies, loud and clear. Monochromes, large letters, freehand drawings and rapid printing/execution techniques are the codes of emergency protest. This spontaneity and graphic style are today heavy with meaning and synonymous with social demands. It is this style that we find today in feminicidal collages.

Josiah Wedgwood, 1787

Social branding

These codes and graphic systems are almost always inherited from an era, or refer to a personality or a significant event. Because they are popular, they echo the history of a people. The slogan "I am a man", for example, refers to the American constitution, and the engraving "Am I not a man and a brother?" created in 1787 by a British abolitionist, almost 200 years earlier. The mask of Guy Fawkes, used by Anonymous, is a tribute to the Powder Conspiracy conspiracy in 1605, whose famous moustaches can be recognized on the engraving below, used in the comic book V for Vendetta in 1989 and the film in 2005.

This is not the first time that a popular movement has been recognized by a particular graphic vocabulary. Although the system is close to traditional branding, it is still different from advertising work. The logic is however the same as for a brand: to gather under the same identifying sign in order to be visible and recognized in the public space. But unlike a brand, this is done with little or no means, and in a hurry (although it sometimes happens in companies too!). In the precise context of social movement identity creation, it is the people who choose and adopt it, making it truly legitimate in the eyes of all: we will rarely see customer feedback on this kind of creation...

The role of the "crowdcoulture"

Formerly coming from minorities to make a claim to a territory heard, forms of social branding are now emerging from crowdculture (participative culture) movements within minorities debating very specific topics on social networks. These movements federate different individuals throughout the world, but gathered for the same cause, united by a symbol, a name, or an emblem to be seen and heard. Examples include Anonymous, Yellow Vests, Femen, Arab Spring, or movements born behind social hashtags (#metoo, #BlackLivesMatter, #WeAll...). These labels become slogans in themselves, "labels", tags on virtual walls.
Unlike the movements of the 1970s, the demands launched by the # sometimes no longer even require a graphic identity, but are sufficient as an identity name. Minimalist, but just as effective, the graphic system of the white cross of the intermittents is also part of this lineage.

Here, then, is where the real particularity of these forms of visual identity lies: they belong to a whole community. They are participatory, and their execution must therefore be achievable by all. Everyone must be able to make it their own. With his body, a label or an acronym. With two pieces of tape for the intermittent performers, a yellow vest, A4 sheets and paint for the collages, a Guy Fawkes mask for Anonymous, lifting his T-shirt for Femen, or waving his fingers in a V shape for the hippies of the 70s.

In '68 in France or in the 1970s in the United States, screen printing was a means of printing quickly to get a message across locally. Today, anyone can download a logo and print it, follow a technical tutorial on instagram to do it alone, or buy a mask in a costume shop. This type of branding is no longer localized, but is spread in a few clicks on the world wide web.

Once created, there is no way to control the life of this badge/slogan. We are in the public domain. Tomorrow, anyone can take these codes that belong to everyone and hijack them for another cause, without fear of accusations of plagiarism. It is a logo without being a logo, a singular brand, but accessible to everyone. The logo of the Black Lives Matter movement has moreover been hijacked into #AllLivesMatter (to defend all lives, thus removing the recognition of the black minority) and #BlueLivesMatter (to support the guardians of order, at the origin of the troubles towards black Americans). Branding debacle. For as the graphic designer Josh Warren-White, who created the BlackLivesMatter logo, explains, "designers create the logo, but social movements create the brand".

Where social branding
divergence from brand branding

Whether they are shared on city walls or online, the visual identities of social demands are always part of a historical or popular context, and will be born out of urgency. In this way, these graphic marks act are revolutionary, in the sense that they impose themselves suddenly and collectively by shaking up our eyes and our consciences. Their strength does not come from a long and patient design work, with a designer who would have forged a powerful and memorable sign, but from an obvious urgency (thank you the chromosome of indignation!) which imposes to make radical choices that will have to be quickly adopted by the greatest number. Spontaneity, chance, or even respect of the highway code for yellow safety vests among the first anti-tax-carbon demonstrators, are therefore conducive to the birth of banners. From then on, it is the urgency of social pressure, which, by endorsing these codes, will really give these signs their strength. Their purely graphic or conceptual qualities become minor. Therefore the symbolic charge which will be transferred in these signs by the personal commitment of those who emit them.

Branding, in its traditional and commercial use, would obviously dream of being as effective, but it knows that it can never impose itself through the prism of a lightning collective adoption, and will have to make propaganda by other means. For example, by investing in the graphic and conceptual qualities of their signs, by inventing incredible storytellings, or by investing in buying advertising space and other available brain time.

If you've made it this far, first of all thank you for taking the time to read this long post.

We hope that it will allow you, if it was not already the case, to pay more attention to these collages, first of all for the victims, but also in the name of all feminist and humanist struggles. Do not hesitate to react by continuing the debate in the comments.

L’article The branding of a social movement: Collages against feminicides est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

The birth of a tyrant

The first public encounter with the beast did not wait for Jurassic Park and was held at the American Museum of Natural History in 1915. In 1902, a museum paleontologist discovered the fiercest of dinosaurs, named Tyrannosaurus Rex by Henry Fairfield Osborn. Being the director of the museum he would constitute one of the largest fossil collections in the world. In order to reveal this discovery, he wanted to show "the most superb carnivorous mechanism (...) in which raptorial destructive power and speed are combined." to the visitors.

It would nevertheless take 6 years and the discovery of a second, more complete specimen to recreate a terrifying skeleton and make visitors tremble as early as 1915. The rise of this 12m long monster was a world premiere. For 30 years afterwards, the American Museum of Natural History was the only proud owner. Today, it is a must-have for natural history museums around the world, and replicas sell like hotcakes (but very expensive hotcakes).

He's alive

The T-rex adventure continued in 1990 when author Michael Crichton published Jurassic Park, and sought a cover for his new book. With his publisher, they agreed not to show flesh and blood dinosaurs. They called on the skills of Chip Kidd, a book cover designer who had just started his career. He tried several options to represent the beast under this "no flesh" constraint: shadows, close-ups of skin or eyes, footprints... but nothing seemed to work. The publisher didn't want him to show bones because the dinosaur had to look alive.

It's finally in the museum that Kidd found inspiration by stumbling onto the giant's skeleton, and then an illustration of Osborn in a souvenir book. He simply photocopied the engraving, and with a pencil and tracing paper, drew a kind of silhouette that gave life to the skeleton and sent it to the author.
The latter answered "wow! fucking fantastic cover".

In this video from his website, Chip Kidd tells the story of the cover of the Jurassic Park novel:

Even before the book was released, the publisher offered Jurassic Park's rights for 1.5 million to 4 film studios, leaving the author to choose between Burton, Joe Dante, Richard Donner or Spielberg. The dinosaurs came to life with Universal studios in 1993 and the director of E.T., who already had a fair amount of experience with various creatures.

Logo hunting

For the needs of the film, it was necessary to create Jurassic Park logo, which would be quickly recognizable, shaped as a badge, and could be deployed on a whole range of supports; from uniforms to car doors, including the promotional supports of the Park itself (t-shirts, lunch boxes, etc.). Something "looking good and not too expensive to decline" as Spielberg wished. It was indeed necessary to design both the visual identity of the Jurassic Park movie and its advertising support for the public, along with the fictional park within this movie.
More than 80 corporations worldwide had already purchased the rights to use Jurassic Park logo for their promotional tools, games, or hamburger boxes, even before it was designed. Hence the urgent need to develop something quickly!

68 million years later....

In addition to the internal team, the creative director -Tom Martin- called on Mike Salisbury to come up with ideas. He is the creator of the visual worlds of Alien, Apocalypse Now, Star Wars, the artistic direction of Rolling Stone magazine and Michael Jackson's CD "Off the Wall", the name "501" of Levi's iconic jeans and the L'Oréal logo.
Mike collaborated with other artists (like Terry Lamb) to find a worthy visual to adapt Jurassic Park on screen. With all these people, more than 100 logos were created... but just as many were rejected! Here are some proposals for Jurassic Park logos:

Eventually, Sandy Collora, concept artist from the film team, took Kidd's dinosaur (the book cover illustrator), circled it and wrote the title below in a rectangle. The Salisbury creative team added some bits of jungle at the bottom to give a scale and make the dinosaur look huge: and so it was done. After passing through so many hands, the T-rex came back to life:

Once incorporated into the film, it was then possible to "brand" the park and give it a more realistic look, like a real brand. The logo lives on cars, uniforms, restaurant aprons, architecture and signage. We had fun listing below (almost all) the logo apparitions in the Jurassic Park I movie (it took us 2 hours though):

So who is the official "owner" of the logo? The rights paid by Universal were generously transferred to Chip Kidd. As an employee of Knopf he was not supposed to receive them personally, but the agency generously gave them to Kidd to thank him for his contribution. A rather nice gesture!

E.T. phones dino

In parallel with the search for a dino logo, it was also necessary to create a poster for Jurassic Park! Tom Martin worked with John Alvin, an artist who developed many film visuals (including E.T. the extraterrestrial), but also lead to unsuccessful trails.

Like Kidd before on the book cover, and the creative team who worked on the logo, he ventured onto footprints, fossils, close-ups of dinosaurs or human / Jurassic creatures encounters. He proposed a myriad of poster ideas that were not selected (source, John Alvin):

Once the logo was finalized, he integrated it and composed with all the movie key element: he created a T-rex combo + park ambiance, on a planet background. This round sphere, probably extracted from the logo, seemed to go to his head. He strangely switched to E.T. compositions with a dinosaur dressing -to please Spielberg? These two conceptual posters for Jurassic Park below (right and left) show a striking resemblance to the E.T. poster in the middle. The creatures' encounter, the moon, composition, colours....

As he almost completed his final version of the Jurassic Park poster, representing the park door ajar and dinosaur tracks coming out of it (the E.T. remake was close!), Universal stopped him: the logo would be used as it is on the poster.
Another project nipped in the bud!

For Americans, an African typography from Germany

For the record, Salisbury used Neuland font for the Jurassic Park title, which he redesigned in his own way. Originally created in Germany by Rudolf Koch - in 1923 - it was designed as a Blackletter but with a Roman style, in order to make Gothic letters easier to read. For those I lost with this typographical jargon: it uses a Gothic construction - large packed handwritten letters that occupy the entire area of the printing block - but in a Roman way, i.e. with straight capital letters (a style inherited from the Romans). On the left; an example of Gothic letters, on the right the Neuland. Below, the letterpress blocks.

One should know that back then Gothic letters were complicated to print and increasingly rare except in Germanic countries. Surfing on a modern wave, in the early 1920s, German designers developed "new typographies", such as the Neuland.

When the Neuland arrived in the United States in the 1930s, the Gothic-style letterpress was unknown as an old dusty fossil from another continent. The Neuland thus totally lost its original meaning! It was branded as "primitive" and was used despite its creator to illustrate "jungle", "adventure" or "safari" (or more clumsily, African...) content. It is now qualified with Papyrus and Chop Suey as stereotyped typography, "stereotypography", or even racist. We'll talk about it in another article.

The story does not say whether the (wrong) choice of the Neuman was deliberate to illustrate a parallel with this catastrophic and unsafe park, or whether it was a stylistic decision to communicate on the park's primitive state. In both cases, Jurassic Park contributed to renew the popularity of this typography, by continuing to promote its "tropical" look.

Branding dinosaurs

As Mike Salisbury explains, "You have to communicate with the right visual clues. (...) Most important to a fictional prop brand is that it must communicate immediately since it has no history and so no associations for the viewer." In this case, the use of a jungle-like typography to describe a Jurassic park seems relevant, and very easy. But how can one succeed in telling the story of something that has no origins?

Regarding movies with many merchandise bearing logos, such as Jurassic Park, Harry Potter or Star Wars; each character, object, planet, ship or dinosaur appears on the screen in a theatrical way with its own style, colours, voices or sounds, accessories... Thought in advance, this type of scenographic details makes it easy to develop branded merchandising (figurines, logos, toys...). A complete work that switches the work of the designer into identity creation, like marketing. It is all about storytelling, and visually communicating through these sets.

But since there are only a few seconds to tell a story on screen and communicate with the right elements, shortcuts are sometimes too obvious and the risk to fall into caricature may rise (wicked = fierce look, at night time, dramatic music / nice = soft, during the day, light colours and soft music). Remember, the first appearance of T-rex is at night during a storm. It would have been hard to imagine the beast standing by a lake in the middle of a radiant afternoon!

An even more cruel logo

For Jurassic Park III's release in 2018, the Spinosaurus stole T-rex's thunder. On this occasion, Universal created a "new logo" featuring its new star, even more cruel than the T-rex. This logo creation was not too difficult this time since the story is already all known and the branding is well established. Never (almost never) change a winning team: the new skeletal profile of the hooked-toothed Spinosaurus fiercely replaces our good old tyrannised tyrannosaurus.

Rediscovered in 2014, the Spinosaurus outperforms its cousin in size with 3 or even 4 more (counting) meters, and an ability to swim. According to Wikipedia, it is "the largest carnivore the earth has ever carried". That's enough to freeze out T-rex! In "real life", with all due respect to Spielberg, the Spinosaurus ate fish 30 million years appart from the T-rex and could never have bitten the tyrant (oops, spoiler alert) because of its too small jaw.

But hey, the big bad guy always wins!

This article is an adapation based on the article "the Hidden History of the Jurassic Park Logo"

L’article The story of the big bad Jurassic Park logosaurus est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

Born in 1930, Wally Olins is a British designer who created the concept of territory branding. Through his branding consulting work, he brought to Britain and the world the idea that brand identity is of paramount importance, and that it shapes everything that organizations do and say about themselves. He worked with Renault, Orange, Tate Modern, Volkswagen, 3i, Tata, Q8 and many other companies. Since his death in 2014, his agency Wolff Olins has produced, among other things, the new uber and Met Museum logos in New York.
In 2011, we had the opportunity to interview him and ask him questions about territorial branding. This exclusive post-mortem interview is revealed at the end of the article.

The birth of territorial identities

Wallace -Wally- Olins, English by birth, grew up in the capital before studying history at St Peter's College of Oxford. He none the less began his career at the Ogilvy and Mather advertising agency in Mumbai, India, as a director, where he spent 5 years. He quickly became interested in brand image even before the term existed and developed a taste for this advertising branch, consisting in building a lasting reputation for a brand or a company. Wally Olins soon made a name in this field and interested more and more companies and NGOs, for which he worked hand in hand with the directors.

Olins was convinced that companies must be involved in this search for identity, and not just relayed to the level of observer. A keen traveller, he worked in Northern Ireland, Mauritius, Poland, Lithuania and Bengal. He thereby helped regions, communities and states to find their image.

A pioneer genius in territorial identity and brand image, he co-founded Wolff Olins with Michael Wolff in 1965 on his return to London, and Saffron Brand Consultants in 2001. He could thus make his mark in territory design. He worked for instance on the Polish identity campaign or the visual identity of Øresund, the bridge and tunnel linking Denmark to Sweden. But his job as a business consultant mainly involved working for increasingly large companies, with many subsidiaries no longer linked to their parent company. By creating meaning and connection between these subsidiaries and their headquarters, Wolff Olins created what would later be called "brand architecture". No matter if you call it brand design, brand identity or reputation, Olins points out that it all comes down to the same thing, that "it's the way companies present themselves. »

Inspiration

He is said to have found a great source of inspiration in the New York school's abstract expressionist art movements of the 1940s and 1950s, especially the Colour Field (worn by Rothko) with its large canvases covered in full-colour tints. In these paintings, colour brings out its pure qualities in the canvas as a flat field of view, with no subject or central point. The absence of relief and the central importance given to colour contrast with the figurative movements of the beginning of the century.

As years go by, Olins wrote books to address his torments about the future of the world. He is concerned about globalization and the belief that gradually everything in the world, everywhere, will be the same; the planet will turn into a huge airport. Olins, on the other hand, thinks that "a country, a region, a city, will be in competition with other countries, regions, cities, to attract foreign investors, builders, tourists, students... Competition between cities and regions will mean that more and more singularity will emerge in response to homogenization, or apparent homogenization. In a rather curious way, one of the most common reactions to this homogenization is that everywhere around the globe, more and more people are looking for authenticity, for an origin. Because in a world where no one knows the origin of anything anymore, we need to hold on to something, to know where it comes from. Big companies are buying more and more local brands, and can no longer understand what people around them want. These are dramatic changes. That's what I'm talking about in my book "Brand New. The shape of brands to come" which is aimed at anyone interested in how the world is changing. »

Connecting people with colours and bridges

It is difficult to discern Olins' work as a solo designer. All projects are always signed with the name of the agency and its two founders, Wolff and Olins. Without knowing exactly who did what and assuming it is a team effort, let's look at some of their most famous logos to scan successes and failures, in brand and territory branding.

In an interview, Olins explained that a good logo should do 4 things. First, it must be moving and rational at the same time; it must address both the hearts and minds of people. Secondly, it must be relevant for all stakeholders. Thirdly, it must be distinct. The purpose of a graphic identity is to distinguish itself from competitors. And fourthly, it must be true; it must come from the heart of the brand, avoid clichés and highlight a concept that must be recognized as realistic and inspiring for all targets. In theory it seems to make sense, but in reality... nothing is that easy!

orange, the color box

In 1990, the Chinese telecommunications giant Hutchison Whampoa limited decided to set up the 4th largest telephone network in Great Britain. The company called on Wolff Olins to develop a brand that would not be technological but would make simplicity, openness and optimism its watchwords. As the brand strategy consulting firm explains, "we gave the network the name of a colour, not a telecom-related name like Vodaphone or Cellnet. We have created a warm and humane style of communication that has quickly become internationally recognized. "orange was born.
Since then, the company has been acquired by France Telecom in 2000, and its image updated in 2010 (see animation above). At the heart of this new communication, the rectangle - hence the brand - opens up to its customers and the world, adapting to each particular need. This rather simple and effective campaign seems to be quite consistent with the brand's initial communication and the current era.

Øresund, connected and connecting territory

Øresund is the tunnel bridge that connects Sweden to Denmark from Malmö to Copenhagen. Olins was responsible for this major project, which was carried out in the 2000s. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to find any graphic elements on this subject today, apart from the logo, with difficulties (see photo above). We therefore conclude that the project was not sustainable.... The logo that was found presented the two cities as distinct points within a large territory. It also looked like the eyes of a comic book character, but the intention may not have been deliberate.
However, the territorial identity exercice is exciting. Two cultures, two countries, two languages, two elements: air and sea. The explicit political intention behind this project was to help residents identify not with a country but with a region on either side of the bridge. On the Swedish side, in the east, the Skåne region is known as Scandinavian California. The whole challenge of the logo was therefore to highlight this dynamism and to bring about a change in the perception of the territory, both in its delimitation and in its content. Olins explains that territory branding is complicated because it must establish a link and connect the perception of this space to reality. "the difficulty of cross-border brands is the need to unite people from different cultures but also to get the right message to the rest of the world."
Today, it seems that the project has evolved into "the greater copenhagen". We have gone from the neutral name of a bridge linking two countries, to a Danish "invasion" (neutral, though) renaming this part of Swedish territory as a suburb of its capital. It probably took water passing under the bridge to get from one name to another! A sensitive subject with a very local name that may not have touched the hearts of all these people back then.

Tate, artistic blur

Introduced in 1999, the logo of the Tate Art Galleries (in England) was designed to unify 4 diverse artistic experiences and embrace nearly 500 years of British and international art. The Tate's wish was to combine their four galleries under the same philosophy. The agency invites its visitors to "look again, think again" and proposes this tagline as a leitmotif for this new logo. The result is a variation of blurs and bold, recognizable as a unit, but in perpetual movement. Wolff Olins reinvented the gallery concept for Tate, moving from a unique and institutional perspective to a collection of brand experiences with a similar attitude. The 4 points mentioned by Olins seem to have been respected here, being moving but rational, relevant, distinct, and authentic.

In 2016, North agency took over the project proposing a blurred but woven logo, which can be easily animated.

Transparent branding with aol.

In the 90s, Aol. (American Online) was one of the only web surfing platforms in the United States. But with the rapid technological evolution, Aol. lagged behind, without managing to catch up, dropping from 27 million users in 2001 to 6 million in 2009. It was precisely at this time that the company left the Time Warner group and tried to fly on its own by becoming an independent public company. It then asked Wolff Olins to design its new visual identity, in order to position it as a "21st century media company".

The three capital letters change in lower case to visually shape a word, which can still be read as an acronym, thanks to the period. Unlike other brands, the new Aol. logo only exists thanks to its background. This logo is like the Internet: dynamic, changing, and invisible without content. The agency asked several artists around the world to customize the logo to bring it to life; it unfolds on ink spots, a goldfish, scribbles, birds, flowers or leaves, drawn characters, a jumping cat, or paint flows. The purpose of this collaboration was to work with artists, journalists and musicians to create "experiences with extraordinary content" according to the agency.

It was rather to make users forget the brand by focussing all the attention on the background! A name change being non-negotiable, the company had to find a way to get rid of a bad reputation linked to a poor web experience. However, Aol.'s reputation should have evolved along with its image. And it didn't.
Unfortunately, 10 years later Aol. is still not getting any better. As Paul Rand said, "the trademark is created by the graphic designer, but it is the company that makes it". The worm was in the apple, and this new gloss didn't change its taste.

London 2012 Olympic Games, a logo that makes everyone agree

The logo for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, launched in 2007 for £400,000, quickly became the subject of much criticism, unpredictable and fierce. The 2012 Olympic Games logo was originally designed by Wolff Olins agency to include everyone in a common experience. There was a need for a logo that would appeal to young people, "a logo that was bold, energetic and dissonant like the city of London". The agency therefore designed it without signs referring to a particular monument or sport, inserting the Olympic rings (a rarity for a logo of this type) and leaving some flexibility on the content. Brands, sponsors, or countries could therefore play with it by inserting their colors, or even removing the rings in case of prohibition of use. For the first time, the logo of the Olympic Games and the Paralympic Games were designed identically, with only a variation in the text but not in the shape.

 

Designed to reach an audience as large as the United Kingdom, it was difficult to get everyone to agree. And yet the brand identity of the London Olympics did succeed in creating consensus: the logo was unanimously considered very ugly. On BBC News, Internet users were invited to vote by giving it a trophy of a silver or wooden spoon: 83% of voters, the overwhelming majority, gave a wooden spoon, signifying their deep disgust for the logo. Far from pleasing the public, it also provoked Iran's anger. The country declared that it could read the letters Z-I-O-N (not 2012), a term referring to the city of Jerusalem.. problem: Iran does not recognize the existence of the state of Israel. "The use of the word Zion to create the logo for the 2012 Olympic Games (...) is a totally outrageous act," said Iranian Olympic Committee President Mohammad Aliabadi in a letter to IOC President Jacques Rogge. They threatened the UK to withdraw from the Games and take other muslim countries along.
As for the advertising campaign, the first spot caused several epileptic seizures among viewers.

With hindsight, however, these games have recorded very strong commitments from spectators, and the "bad buzz" of its debut nevertheless succeeded in getting people to talk about it and make it known throughout the world. Without touching the hearts of the audience, it managed to be relevant and distinct. We wish the same luck to the new Paris 2024 Games logo...

 

Although he passed away in 2014, Wally Olins continues to be a reference, an icon with a bow tie and round glasses, as he "self-branded" himself.

Our exclusive interview with Wally Olins

Aurélien from Actulogo had the opportunity to gather Wally Olins' opinion on territorial branding during an interview conducted in 2011, which we have never published until now.

You may listen to the interview below, or read the exclusive transcription:

You're particularly involved in territories and region branding. How do you explain that so many territories and regions crave to have their own brand?

Wally Olins (W.O.)

There are several reasons for it. First of all over the last 50 and certainly over the last 25 years there is a much stronger movement amongst smaller countries to assert themselves. There are far more countries now than there have ever been before, and within countries regions (the Basque Country, Catalonia in Spain, Scotland in GB, and so on) are all trying to assert some kind of feeling of -not necessarily total independence- but a feeling of self confidence about who they are. And then you have all these countries that were formerly part of what we used to call the Soviet Block, they are all coming back under these circumstances. That's one reason.

The second reason is that now if you do not have a national brand that is recognisable and which people can respect, then you don't get so much tourism, you don't get so much foreign direct investment, and your brands when you export them don't have the same value as other people's brands. I'll give you a particular example of this: Slovakia manufactures more cars than any other countries in the world, but you will never see a sign on any Toyota, on any Peugeot or on any Citroen that says 'made in Slovakia'. What happens is that these countries are labelled as cheap manufacturer facilities and all the value added goes to the other countries. What you've got then are a series of situations where countries that you  might call 'great legacy nations' like France, Germany, Italy, or Britain where the nation is known, where the products and services of certain kind is respected, the art, culture and history are known, so they have a very particular place and if you take your country -France- it's perfectly possible to exploit that situation you're interested in.

Take L'oréal Paris for example. Classically developing an idea around its city of origin which gives it more value. A Polish cosmetic company -there are several which are quite good- they can't say they are from Krakow because that doesn't mean anything. In fact if it did mean anything to anybody at all it would mean I'm not going to buy it, I'd rather buy L'oréal.

There are huge incentives here, commercial incentives, appart from the political incentives, there are genuine commercial imperatives to do that. And because the world is becoming more and more competitive, organisations in branding cities, regions, nations, are getting more and more concerned to do this. But there are huge problems associated with it.

I see two kinds of regional branding: the corporate one (that attracts companies) and the touristic one. Do you think it's crucial to split them?

I think there are not two, there are three. There is the issue of foreign direct investment, which can be investments in all kind of things. It can be investments in research, in a R&D center, in manufacturing, but also in universities, in all sorts of things... The crossover between tourism and foreign direct investment is not as straight forward as you might think.

For example, I may decide as a tourist to buy a house in Slovenia. Is that tourism or foreign direct investment? Where do you draw the line?

So you have to be very clear about the way the nation projects itself, that you're talking about a series of issues which are addressed sometimes to overlapping audiences.

But the key to it is that you have an idea: an idea of France, an idea of Spain an idea of Italy... An idea which you can interpret for different audiences in different ways. And you won't use the same words nor the same images but the idea behind the brand, wherever it manifests itself, has to be the same.

From a business point of view, is there any risk for these regions to be related to a simple product and loose the culture of the region?

That happens. Germany is associated with very high quality engineering. But it is not associated with smart clothes. So Hugo Boss doesn't make a big noise about being German. Because it doesn't help. You make a big noise if you're in making cars, in engineering. And the same thing applies to a lot of countries.

There are some countries where the associations are very very strong. In some countries you're going to have a very very broad range of ideas which are related to the country. In other countries you don't get such a broad range of ideas. So one has to accept that what people look at are stereotypes.

I think the classic example is probably the United States. Well there are 3 or 4 quite clear stereotypes. One of them is opportunity. There is nowhere in the world where you get more opportunity than in the United States. The American Dream, all that stuff; that's one idea. Another idea is technology: Steve Jobs, Microsoft, Silicon Valley and all that. It's a completely different idea but a very powerful one. The third idea is the high stream: MacDonalds, Disney, all that junk. And there are more than three ideas. Now these ideas are separate but in different times you will think different things about America.

For example I read a very interesting research a couple of years ago when Bush was President. In Egypt, in Cairo, they asked a few questions. Question number 1: which country in the world do you hate most? America. Question number 25, if you wanted to emigrate, where would you move to? America. So that gives you a feeling of how people's perception are confused: they are contradictory, but they are powerful. And you get that about most countries -no that's not correct- you get that about some countries.

There are other countries where there aren't any perceptions at all. I was working in Lithuania, and people said: what does the world think about Lithuania? The answer is they don't even think about Lithuania, they don't know it's there. There's that set of perceptions, too.

In France these last two years we've seen dozen of towns, regions, departments or territories trying to become brands. Have you noticed one in particular?

W.O.

A couple of years ago, I think I noticed Lyon. It was very clever and very funny. It was a little boy who was a bit naughty and a bit charming and a bit -not exactly rough but a bit wild, and it was very clever and I thought it was extremely amusing and individual idea. It was a few years ago that I noticed it, I don't know wether they kept it, and they did a lot of things around this little boy. I really liked it I though it was good, very clever and very self confident in a relaxed kind of way.

Do you think these local brandings are something just trendy, or we'll have to expect more these years to come?

W.O.

I think it's both.

Do you think it's something that will last for centuries?

W.O.

I think that what I explained earlier, the imperative to promote your area derives on one hand from a local patriotism, a very strong feeling to describe who you are, particularly in the areas which are changing. Lyon is an example, it's an area which used to be very industrial. On the other hand it's a desire to attract a growing economy, a desire to attract people so the economy can grow. There is a real commercial imperative to this. It's a requirement: if I'm competing with somebody else but this somebody is promoting themselves more heavily than me then they will get the investments and they will become richer and I'll stay poor!

Is it crisis related?

W.O.

No.

Let's talk about graphism. Your work involves design but you're not a designer yourself?

W.O.

I'm very involved and interested in it. I think I have a feeling for it. I didn't study design, my academic background is history.

What makes a good territory logo?

W.O.

One of the main characteristics is that you see it very often. If you see anything enough, however good or bad it is, if you see it again and again and again you can't avoid it, it's just there. It doesn't matter wether the "stars and stripes" is a good or bad logo, you see it. The flag is so ubiquitous you see it everywhere that you can't really avoid it.

Even if it's something really ugly?

W.O.

You get used to it. The national symbols, their continuous presence is very important. Of course the American flag is fortunate because there's nothing quite like it, the UK flag is also quite fortunate. The French flag is also very very distinctive but that's not because the flag is distinctive it's because France is distinctive. The Italian flag is an imitation or an emulation of the French flag.

Aurélien

But for me flags are not logos.

W.O.

I understand that but I'm mentioning that as a context. I think, one of the world's almost perhaps greatest logotypes is the red cross. Because what it says quite clearly and unequivocally without any doubt in anybody's mind is this is total vulnerability. "We have no weapons, no nothing, we are completely neutral and if you want to kill us you can kill us". But the vulnerability is so great the feeling that you have about the red cross idea is so strong that if you actually attack the red cross you are committing such a hideous crime, much worse than any other crime.

That was my next question actually. What's the best region brand logo that you've ever seen?

W.O.

I can't tell you immediately in my head which logo or brand region that I have ever seen ever strikes me. But I think that one of the most distinctive is Japan. And that isn't just the flag. It's the way the Japanese create an idea of themselves of what they do. So Japanese logotype and things around Japan tend to have that rather dramatic simplicity which I find very unusual and quite striking.

And what's the brand you made that you're the most proud of?

W.O.

People ask me that all the time and I always say "it's the one I'm working on now". Whatever the one I'm working on happens to be. But there are two that stand out a lot which I've been involved in a bit. One of them is Orange, now it belongs to cross telecom, and the other is first direct the online bank. I think we've done some fairly dramatic things in this company. Have you seen A1 the new mobile phone company for Australia? It's worth looking at. Times change, fashions change, some of the stuff that I was involved in the sixties and the seventies even has lasted very well. P&O, the flag for P&O, I did it in 1970 or something. I think it's still incredibly strong. So I find it difficult quite to say this is my favorite or this is not my favorite, some of them I don't like so much and some of them I like a bit more!

Okay, so which one do you like... less?

I think the ones I like less are the ones where we have not been able to make changes, because the nature of what the organisation is doing has to stay the same. What happens is that a huge organisation, like let's say Renault, or someone like that they have to stay in the same place in the world. But -they have to keep changing because the world keeps changing. So I can't stay and not change what I look like, but I'll change what I look like in such a way that people don't notice I've changed. In other words, I have to stay where I am, I have to change a bit. And a lot of the work that we do, inevitably with very large companies, we make gradual changes over a long period of time in order to stay in the same place, in order to stay in the position they were before.
Do I like it visually? Not always, but I think sometimes the results are very satisfactory, that they work very well. I think they're very effective very often. But a lot of the work that any organisation does is to do with helping the organisation to compete in a market place that is getting more and more competitive – where you have online sales, where you have competition absolutely everywhere in the world, and where what you're doing becomes more and more and more intensely focused on certain areas.

So you can't always make the dramatic changes that you want, you're gonna make changes digital and small… make the thing work online or whatever maybe. Occasionally you get the opportunity to do something really dramatically new, but not that often. Most of the time you have to modulate, I mean… we are not in business to win awards, we’re in business to help our clients to success.

Is there a brand that you didn't work on but you would have loved to?

I would like, one day, if it ever happens, to work on Europe. I would like that. I mean, the European idea is such a mess and there's so no lead issue, and there are so many problems associated with it because it's work in progress, and the fiscal structure as we all know is not working properly, and there are lots of small countries that are making lots of trouble and they're pretty sure you’re all skeptical we know about that.

But I think it is a great idea, and it is an idea that most Europeans simply do not understand and have not been educate to understand what it means. To becoming European does not mean to say you stop being French or you stop being Parisian or you stop coming from Manchester. What it means is that you have another dimension to what you are. And I think that that is a programme, if you can work on that, that would take two generations before there is an European idea. But I would love to be involved in thinking the implications of that truth.

Two final questions now. Is there a recent logo change that you've especially noticed?

W.O.

Well everybody noticed Gap. Not a big deal. Everybody's noticed McDonalds, it's not such a logo change but it's a changing. I mean, these are what I'm talking about, they've changed because they feel (24'20) McDonalds clearly feel, it’s gotta look more warm, it’s gotta look more friendly, not to be so agressive, it's got to be interested in all the stuff with sustainability, it changes its appearance a bit, yeah those kind of things. But I'm not obsessed with them, I think that's nature of the commercial world.

Well I'm obsessed with the logotypes as part of my job! Last question that I ask to every person I interview: do you have a piece of advice for branding beginners?

W.O.

I think that it's very very important that you understand the new technologies that you are managing. I think it's very important to get hold of digital because increasingly, logos are moving. They're not static. And if you looked at what my old company did on the 2012 Olympics three or four years ago, I think it was a very clever anticipation of the way in which that world is moving now.

Everything is digital, everything is moving, everything’s gonna work with everything else, everything's gonna change color, everything's gonna change shape, nothing's gonna be static. Everything’s gonna be moving. And you have to remember when you design this, when you do this design work, that that’s what it’s about. If you don't remember that, then you will be stuck. And a lot of the work that I was involved in, some years ago, is not usable anymore. Because that technology is so key, a young designer has to understand digital and think in three dimensions and think in movement.

Aurélien, Actulogo
Alright. Thank you very much mister Olins.

L’article Wally Olins, father of territory branding est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

Our proposal

The concept of the logo:
An Eiffel Tower sports track

A sporty boost: Fluid curves, fast lines. A sports track emerges before our eyes, telling the story of movement and speed. 

The Eiffel Tower: Solidly placed on the ground, a 3D Eiffel Tower is emerging.  The magic of this sign comes from its possible double reading. In turn sports track and Eiffel Tower. The eye seems not to want to choose.

An encounter: A logo that tells a story of encounter and convergence. It is a profoundly humanistic and optimistic sign that offers a perspective of collective progress. 

An invitation to the world: 5 colours, 5 continents, all start off fairly on the track. The perspective of these lines seems to open generously to our gaze, as an invitation to participate in the celebration. 

Citius - Altius - Fortius: Faster, higher, stronger... This sign echoes the IOC motto with the symbol of the Eiffel Tower. It affirms the audacity to go further, thus illustrating the idea of surpassing oneself.

Two logos for a shared vision

The two logos are from the same shape. A simple change of angle of view makes it possible to switch from the logo of the Olympic Games to that of the Paralympic Games. This symbolic rapprochement between the two logos is a strong gesture that can act as a bridge between the world of able-bodied athletes and that of athletes with disabilities.

A logical evolution....

This logo proposal is an extension of the candidature logo. In addition to the Eiffel Tower, which remains the central element, we can find the idea of "3D strips" as well as a similar chromatic logic. It is a question of continuity, while bringing a form of maturity to the logo.

A history of links

As it unfolds, the logo becomes the guiding thread of the visual universe. Like a ribbon that unfolds, it sets the rhythm of the layouts. This ribbon will also make possible to weave links between images, as if to connect actors and spectators, champions and champions' seeds!  

This project was not selected... But, as Pierre de Coubertin said, the most important thing is to participate!

Erratum: I get slipped into the earpiece that the expression "The essential thing is to participate" is not by Pierre de Coubertin! He would have borrowed it, like nothing, from the Bishop of Pennsylvania who was celebrating Mass at the first London Games. It is like the Olympic motto: "faster, higher, stronger", which he recovered from Albert le Grand College in Arcueil (France)...

L’article Logo project for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

Source: Paul Rand's website

Everything is design!

Born Peretz Rosenbaum in 1914 and deceased in 1996, Paul Rand is a graphic design legend. Throughout his 60-years long career, he changed America's opinion on visual communication. With his editorial designs, advertisements, and visual identity works, Rand brought avant-garde European ideas to the United-States, mixing visual arts and commercial design. His colourful combinations, approach of typography and use of media translate his desire to "defamiliarize the ordinary". His style consequently still have an impact on graphic design today.

Rand first made his mark in the 1930s with a bold and modernist style, designing magazine and book covers a few years later. He brought winds of change to Madison Avenue by creating advertisements inspired by the famous German Bauhaus school, or by movements such as De Stijl or Russian constructivism. Rand was convinced that the strength of graphic design lies in its ability to be a universal language, through the simplicity and geometry of its forms. He thus said: "one quickly realizes that simplicity and geometry are the language of timelessness and universality".

After the war, from 1955 onwards, he distinguished himself with progressive graphic identities that served companies' interests. As an artistic director, he helped to transform the advertising industry by emphasizing the importance of graphic design and visuals over writing. He produced logos for large companies such as IBM, ABC, UPS, or Steve Jobs' NeXT, still legendary and almost unchanged to this day (except UPS).

By creating complete brand identities, Paul Rand transformed corporate communication in North America. According to his colleague Lou Danziger, he managed to persuade companies, almost on his own, that design can be a powerful business tool. As an author, teacher and designer, Rand confirmed the idea that good design is good business as Thomas J. Watson Jr., IBM's CEO, stated. Paul Rand invites his clients, students and ourselves to look at the world with a fresh eye, because: "everything is design! »

Poet and businessman

Born in Brooklyn from Orthodox Jewish parents, Paul Rand started practicing his art as early as 3 when he recopied commercials in his parents' shop. Well not exactly recopying, because the Jewish religion represses figurative representation. This is probably where his interest in abstraction began. In 1934, after taking lessons at New York's Pratt Institute and the Art Students League, Rand began his career by making illustrations for a union that sold them to newspapers and magazines for advertising and articles. The following year, yearning for more control over his work, Rand went solo, creating layouts and ads for a small group of clients. He was 21 years old.
During this period, concerned that his Jewish identity might hinder his progression in the professional world, especially in advertising, he changed his name from Peretz Rosenbaum to Paul Rand - a name that since became iconic, foreshadowing his genius in brand identity.

In his magazine covers, since the late 1930s, Rand adopted both European modernism and American spirit and functionalism in his graphic style. His distinctive signature was praised by László Moholy-Nagy, a master of the Bauhaus and one of Europe's most famous modernist designers, who had recently immigrated to Chicago. "Among all these young Americans, he writes, it seems that Paul Rand is one of the best and most competent. He is an idealist and a realist, who uses the language of the poet and the businessman." Rand's work was regularly featured in the daily lives of Americans in advertising posters and logos for consumption brands, from alcohol to make-up.

Source: Paul Rand's website and personal photographs of the exhibition

The modern American man

Rand's art achieved its full maturity in the 1950s, which coincided with a dynamism in the New York art scene, inspired by European abstract art. Indeed, European modernism - embracing abstraction, asymmetry, and dynamism in typographical and pictorial composition - attracted considerable attention since the Second World War, as many artists had left Nazi Germany for America. Rand embraced these new trends with open arms, already touched by German and British modernist design in his teenage years. His inspirations are Cassandre, Miró, Klee, or Léger... He once stated: "It is integrity, honesty, absence of sentimentality and absence of nostalgia, it is simplicity, clarity. That's what modernism means to me..."

One must underline that at that time, in the middle of the Cold War, abstract artists (like Pollock) were promoted by the American government via the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a propaganda organization. In contrast with the figurative communist art, the red enemy, abstract art was praised by large fortunes and institutions such as the MoMA, Rockefeller, or IBM. Because it was new and exhilarating, or simply to avoid the wrath of the government that blacklisted "communist witches" or anyone with sympathizing ideas, artists embarked on this art which also guarenteed political immunity.

Paul Rand is one of the lucky fews to be both a modernist and an American. Other artists are often refugees and can be accused at any time of being Reds. Rand is therefore in a very good position to be the man of the moment.

Source: Paul Rand's website

Rand and Eye-Bee-M

From 1956 to 1991, Paul Rand signed the identity of one of the largest corporate design projects in North American history: IBM (International Business Machines Corporation). This is the very beginning of corporate graphic identities. Before, all visual media was conveyed by advertising, but companies quickly understood that to survive in this jungle of images you have to stand out, and not only through advertising. Above all, it was crucial to set distance with the communists; presenting a modernist and innovative image was an obvious solution!

IBM's new design mission - supported by Thomas Watson Jr., the son of the company's founder - visually transformed every aspect of the company, from electric typewriters to computers, advertising and architecture. The idea was to break with a conservative image and look towards the future, to illustrate IBM's renewed growth. It was completely new at the time. Watson called on Eliot Noyes, a former colleague and architect who worked on curative design of the MoMa, among other things, to set up a team composed of Paul Rand (for graphics), Eero Saarinen (architecture) and Charles and Ray Eames (scenography, publications, videos).

IBM's new identity is thus conceived as a global, moving, immediately recognizable work of art delivering a strong message. With design as the main driving force. Charles Eames pointed out, "design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.".

Rand designed a modern logo with bright colours coming to life on stationery, brochures, packaging and buildings. It was a major break with the graphics that IBM had been displaying since its origins, post-World War I, and the repeated inconsistencies of their communication campaigns. Paul Rand unified IBM's visual identity, helping it to be recognized by the public as a great company at the forefront of technology (and anything but communist, that goes without saying).
Updated in 2017, we devoted an article to the IBM logo and its evolution, which we invite you to discover.

Source: Paul Rand's website and personal photographs of the exhibition

American branding

IBM is the first company for which he conceives a brand identity and all visual communication campaigns. While this is only a fraction of his work, his achievements for ABC, UPS, Westinghouse, Cummins or Enron become visible and ubiquitous in the United States and abroad. They are the symbol of a post-war global culture crowning the political, military and commercial success of the United States. His work is available on his website.

Source: Paul Rand's website

Rand, period.

Rand's multiple renderings illustrate the versatility of its logos on various platforms, from advertising to packaging, stationery or signage. When he presented his creative idea, Rand presented only one concept to his clients in brochures he had designed and written himself. He developed it well beyond the demand, to point out the quality and potential of the proposed design, and anticipate any customer request. For control purposes, Paul Rand could sometimes go so far as to negotiate a lower remuneration, in order to be sure to remain in control of his work. Uncompromising on THE solution he offered on paper, he was supported by Noyes who rounded off the angles orally, and finished persuading the reticent bosses. The eye-bee-M logo, created internally, was actually banned at first, before becoming the icon we know today !

For some companies, Rand continued to monitor the evolution of his creations for several decades, to adjust them to changes and trends.

His tenacity gave the world of graphic design more credibility: Rand proposed an abstract and universal language aimed at supporting a company's growth, restoring a bad image, or deterring anti-communist detractors. But many of the leaders he addressed did not always see this in a positive light, or thought that a new logo alone would be enough to make people change their minds about a company. As he then pointed out, "the trademark is created by the graphic designer, but it is the company that makes it". A good brand image does not stand alone, do not judge a book by its cover.... ! Véronique Vienne explains it: "To stand up to these authoritarian leaders, he had only one stone in his bag: the certainty that the graphic principles he applied were the right ones, that visual language was universal, that rigour did not exclude poetry, that simplicity did not mean nudity, that freedom was not synonymous with anarchy, and that abstraction was a wonderful means of communication." Stubborn, but rightly so.

NeXT !

In 1986, for example, he worked for Steve Jobs who commissioned him to create a visual identity for his computer company, for the coquettish sum of $100,000. Since the designer had a very specific methodology, he proposed Jobs a 100-page booklet that described the creative process step by step to the reader, up to the final (and unique) proposal. Giving the client a written argument was part of Rand's usual process, who avoided any oral presentation. Later, when Steve Jobs was asked how it was to work with Rand, he replied, " I asked him if he would come up with a few options, and he said,'No, I will solve your problem for you and you will pay me. You don't have to use the solution. If you want options go talk to other people. »

In his explanatory guide for the client, Paul Rand explained the origin of the change from Next to NeXT: it sounded too much like "Exit". By including an "e" in lower-case, close to upper-case characters, the word gains a new rhythm and requires another form of concentration from the reader, who then reads the word as it is really written. It should be noted that even today, NeXT is still written in common text, as if it was an acronym: Rand's concept has gone beyond graphics.

Source: Paul Rand's website

For the short story, the cube of the logo was first placed straight on the surface, without an oblique axis. In his file, Rand had added what would now look like an envelope mock-up, with a sticker of the logo placed at an angle. During the printing of the report, someone asked him "Why don't you make them all like the one on the envelope?" This simple modification is the key element that convinced Steve Jobs, so admiring of Rand's work that he reprinted the booklet for distribution.

An unparalleled signature

Paul Rand succeeded in changing the American business landscape through his work, being a key player in this economic transition. He still is one of the few designers who signed all his creations, posters or magazine covers, as early as 1936. A way to elevate them as works of art and to display his artistic authority and creative decision-making to the client. A hell of a dare, we wish we could do the same today!

Rand was undoubtedly an pioneer, both in style and in vision. By changing others' look upon brand identity, he shook up the whole history of graphic design. But no one should hope to reach his level by taking inspiration directly from his work, because according to his friend and colleague Louis Danziger, a graphic designer: "If you want to be as good as Rand, don't look at what he does, look at what he looks at. »

To go further and find daily inspiration, here's a pdf with quotations by Mr Rand.

L’article Paul Rand, everything is design! est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

Piste 1 : Un dialogue de formes

Cette piste propose de traiter la Romanité avec un langage graphique contemporain. De faire écho au musée dans son architecture.

On proposait très simplement de partir des deux formes géométriques les plus élémentaires, le rond et le carré. Le rond pour les Arènes (R comme Romanité), le carré pour le musée (M comme Musée). Ces deux formes fonctionnant l'une et l'autre en écho, selon des modalités similaires au deux architectures. En choisissant d'utiliser une acronyme MR cela permet d'introduire un signe fort en guise de logo. Il est modulable et permet une identification directe de l'institution.

Son dessin moderne allié à l'iconographie du musée (pièces, photos immersives) permet de définir la personnalité du musée de la Romanité : un lieu où l'on parle de l'histoire au présent.

L’article Projet d’identité visuelle pour le Musée de la Romanité est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

A blue flamingo from the desert

In 2019, the Printemps de Pérouges Festival goes for californian vibes with an offbeat visual, featuring a blue flamingo in a pink desert... Sunglasses, feathers, rocks and cacti are the backdrop for this 23rd edition of the festival.

The design of this visual is in line with the previous editions: the lettering at the top of the poster, and an illustration made of cut-out and origami papers. The visual spirit is definitely "pop"... with a dash of unexpected: a blue flamingo!

That's where little Louison (9 years old) comes in: "But... flamingos are not blue, thy are pink!!".... argument quickly followed with an equally crazy answer: "Well, elephants are pink sometimes!"...
In short, all tastes and colours are in nature... A discussion that could end with the Little Prince's remark "what matters is that emotion is in the unexpected"!

7 years and 7 posters...

Every year, for the past 7 years, the festival team has renewed its trust in Graphéine. The poster series increases and is enriched... and always with this guiding principle of paper sculptures! You can rediscover the making-of of the creation of the previous posters here or here for the 2017 and 2018 posters.

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The program

Making of...

Our first creative concepts were oriented towards a more nocturnal and disco atmosphere, with the flamingo staged on a giant piano keyboard, and surrounded by disco balls...
A composition that will not be selected, in favour of the even more offbeat visual that we presented above.

The 23rd edition of the Pérouges Spring Festival will be held from June 12 to 27 on the Plaine de l'Ain stage.

L’article Californian vibes for the 2019 Printemps de Pérouges festival est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

A vibrant and creative identity

Graphéine designed the brand identity of "République - Grolée-Carnot". The ambition was to bring together Lyon's three main shopping streets under the same banner, and to make it an essential destination.

Discover the brand identity case study.

The art of creating the event!

In parallel with our graphic work, our colleagues from the agency "Les Gens et vous" took care of all the activations of this brand. Accompanied by the talented Tetro agency, they have set up a series of commercial activities that go off the beaten track.

Thanks to their know-how, new and interactive experiences have been created, such as a giant fresco, a floating garden or a huge ball pool in the fountain in Place de la République.

A giant participative fresco on the place de la République

In March 2018, the first major action took place. More than 7,000 Lyonnais have created a huge 500 m² ephemeral mosaic fresco designed by the Brazilian artist Fernando Volken Togni on Place de la République. This work required more than 22,000 tiles.

In the end, it only took 48 hours to reveal this work! The result was simply impressive!

A floating garden in the heart of Lyon

On the occasion of Mother's Day, Tetro transformed the Place de la République into a huge floating garden to offer Lyon residents a break from the hustle and bustle of the city in a green setting.

To create a strong and atypical image, they invited the plant architect Patrick Nadeau, who designed a dome made from Japanese shrubs and floral plants.

Magic emerges from this installation. The garden is accessible to the public and designed as a bucolic route in an urban environment where passers-by can stroll around and take a Zen break.

In the evening, this vegetable dome turns into an ephemeral restaurant where 10 winners had the chance to taste a meal designed by Gaëtan Gentil, a starred chef from Lyon. During the night, the dome lights up to prolong these magical and spectacular moments throughout the weekend.

Turning a fountain into a ball pool!

For the summer season, the two agencies designed the "Le grand bain" operation in a 50s atmosphere. At the heart of the system, in the fountain basin of the Place de la République, they imagine a huge ball pool. An original and family experience to extend your holidays in the heart of the city. More than 90,000 balls, parasols, deckchairs, an atypical setting that creates a holiday atmosphere. Sports challenges and entertainers will bring life to the centre of Lyon in a relaxed and fun atmosphere.

L’article République Grolée-Carnot or the art of creating the event est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

MoMA, who are you?

Before I rush to the top of this logo-graphic investigation, allow me to make the presentations with one of the most famous cultural institutions that the big apple has to offer! The Museum of Modern Art in New York was inaugurated in 1929. Today the MoMA has become a must with one of the most important collections of modern and contemporary art in the world.

The creation of MoMA was an initiative of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, an American socialist and philanthropist figure, and two of his friends Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn, influential and progressive patrons. The three friends decided to create an institution dedicated to modern art in order to preserve recognized works and open the doors to young creation. Although Abby put a lot of energy into this project, unfortunately she did not contribute financially. Her husband was not very fond of modern painting, so he refused to devote part of his fortune to it.

Proof that the history of this family remains linked to that of the MoMA, on February 5, 2019, the Rockefellers made the largest donation ever made for a museum by leaving the sum of 200 million dollars to the MoMA!

"MoMA" a logo both image and sound

Two syllables so simple that they could be a child's first word.
A sound that quickly imposed itself as an evidence and became the image of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Four letters that have become such an important work of art as those housed in the museum. An icon at the height of a city that is a world symbol of modernity thanks in part to Milton Glaser's famous slogan "I <3 NY".
 A little "o" like a little mouth that says "MoMA!". A simple graphic choice that gives all the rhythm and architectural dimension of a MoNUMENTAL logo. The small and the big; the round and the square.

MoMA(s) and PoPA(s) full of love

And yet, to get to this obvious point it took time, talent and love. Caring parents who, year after year, have followed one another to raise the child and make this creation the paragon of the visual identity of a modern art museum, often imitated but never equalled.

A mysterious Genesis

Their names are Morris Fuller Benton, Ivan Chermayeff & Tom Geismar, Matthew Carter, Bruce Mau, Paula Scher, Ben Parker & Paul Austin. The list is long and may be incomplete! All of them contributed to his education. The best designers have succeeded one another to sculpt and polish four letters that are now part of the world's cultural and graphic heritage. Everyone has made a contribution. All of them respected his strong character given at birth.
But who is at the origin of this visual asset - this little "o" - so simple and brilliant and which gives all the salt of this memorable design?

MoMA was born American and could have been named Franklin

Initially, therefore, it was a typographic choice that will remain the matrix of the logotype for more than 50 years: Morris Fuller Benton's Franklin Gothic No. 2. With the legibility and simplification of shapes as a focus, the Franklin Gothic is the American character that will impose the use of sans serif typefaces as the image of the new typographical modernity. Franklin Gothic stands out from the other sans serif of its time by the "double loop" design traditionally associated with the « a » and the "g" lower case of the serif typographies.

1964, first steps in an open and joyful simplicity

Let's try to understand why this identity has been a success since 1964. The choice of the acronym to shorten the name has created a very strong emotional relationship between the institution and its public. This diminutive gives a much more accessible image. The syllables [Mo] and[ MA] refer to possession and selfness. "Me", "Mine"and "My » that allows the institution to descend from its scale so that everyone can do it for themselves. It's my MoMA.
The name becomes both memorable and emotionally charged for the public, while communicating the idea of democratizing access to culture.

The minimalism of this graphic choice succeeds in showing modesty, as much as this simplicity finds its sources in abstract art, suprematism, Bauhaus, in other words modern art.

It seems to me that this desire to reach out - without falling into nonsense and "populism " - to the least educated audiences is to be found in Ivan Chermayeff's initial response of 1964. The use of the orange-red colour for Franklin Gothic lettering N°2 supports this intention by adding a warm touch of colour.

Note for the future: it will be necessary to consider whether the success of this graphic gesture, its passage to the status of a cult work of world graphic design, and the devotion that follows - accentuation of minimalism through a black and white passage of the logo and successive accentuations of the "geometrization" of letters - is not a contradiction in terms with the museum's mission to open.
This disappearance of colour, which gives way entirely to the sole form of the "glyph" (as an isolated sign of a writing system), seems to be the natural evolution of the most famous graphic signs in the world. The evolution of the Apple and Nike logos are perfect examples, as can the Christian cross.

The point where it becomes really interesting is that, contrary to popular belief, the logo as we know it today, i.e. in its "MoMA" version with the little "o", is not Ivan Chermayeff's work, as his graphic relationship with the famous Mobil logo (geometric lineal lettering, M capital and tiny O) might have led to believe.
And you are not at the end of your surprises since this graphic discovery, this trick that makes all the difference, is not really the work of a designer!

1966 - 1980: The client, this unexpected genius!

Indeed, incredible twist discovered during the writing of this article, this cult logo is actually a co-creation of the Geismar-Chermayeff studio which designed the acronym "MOMA" entirely in CAPS and composed in Franklin Gothic n°2 in 1964, and the other of the museum administration which had the brilliant idea to impose a tiny "o" on it!
 Stephen F. Eskilson, author and professor of art history, reveals this incredible anecdote in his book «Graphic design, A new history». According to Stephen, the tiny "o" appeared in the 1980s and was acclaimed by the museum's internal administration because it gives more personality to the acronym and at the same time transforms it into a name. Another major advantage is that it makes it easier for people who do not speak English to say the name. If this version of the logo officially appeared in the 1980s, the idea is finally even older - the second twist discovered by reading an article in the New York Times on 21 September 2003 - since it belongs to Alfred H. Barr, director of the museum in 1966, then on summer vacation in Greensboro. His summer craze will also give nightmares to his colleagues who will not be able to bear this visual stuttering.

A brand gains value over time.
After almost two decades of in-house use, the MoMA logo is finally appearing on communication media for the public. The legend of the MoMA logo was born!

And at the same time, it's the whole myth of the client who would have only bad ideas about design and who would destroy the beautiful creations of graphic designers, which is shattered ;)

2002: MoMA assumes its voice

In the early 2000s, MoMA sought to affirm its brand image. The Museum feels limited in its possibilities of graphic expression. Tired of his own identity, it asked the Canadian studio Bruce Mau to explore new typographic alternatives to create a new signage system. After several unsuccessful attempts, the studio realized that Franklin Gothic was the perfect silent voice for MoMA. At the same time adapted to be visible in the urban context, its simplicity is also adequate to avoid parasitizing the contemplation of arts pieces. Rather than diluting its image in a multitude of typographical options, MoMA becomes full Franklin Gothic. This choice to capitalize on the existing, to make this graphic design last over time... it is the sine qua non condition to hope one day to become an icon.
According to Wikipedia, the French noun "modernité" has been used since the second third of the 19th century. It's an evolution of the medieval Latin "modernitas", derived from the Latin adjective "modernus", itself derived from the Latin radical "modus" ("measure", "limit", "way", "mode"). In history, modernity is associated with the modern era, which began in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople, or in 1492, with the discovery of America by Christophe Collomb. To sum up, Modernity is therefore a little bit of Mode... and a lot of Eternity!

However, Bruce Mau noticed that the Franklin Gothic that the museum was using did not really seem to him to be real Franklin. Somewhere in its evolution, from Benton's original version to its digital version, he had lost its spirit, becoming a soul-less hybrid digital version. And that's when type designer Matthew Carter comes in!

MoMA then shows its first signs of coquetry and undergoes a facelift under the expert eye of typedesigner Matthew Carter.
According to Matthew Carter, lifting the Franklin Gothic was like asking an architect to design an exact replica of a building. But it was a job he was happy to do. He considered the opportunity to study these letters in depth and to grasp them as faithfully as possible as a kind of education.
The result of this goldsmith's work is the creation of the MoMA Gothic typeface. It’s available in two versions, one for signage and the other for the layout of body texts.

2004, the chic upperclass minimalism

At the beginning of the 2000s, the objective of Paula Scher's team was to bring consistency to the MoMA's graphic charter and, incidentally, to highlight a logo that until now has tended to be somewhat overly shy on exhibition posters. As for the rest, there was no reason to question the design of the logo, which Pentagram considers to be an untouchable classic.
 Paula Scher's solution lies in the design of a composition grid (surely scribbled in a taxi, her preferred place of inspiration) that perfectly ventilates each piece of information and in which the MoMA logo is tilted vertically in the margin. This unexpected and unprecedented visual approach for the museum will provide a highly effective signage effect, an essential quality to stand out in the New York urban landscape. This new design provided by Pentagram will undoubtedly be a decisive step in building the worldwide reputation of the MoMA visual identity.

The « good design » paradox

MoMA is not a public space. But since we can only hope that a museum of contemporary art should be accessible to as many people as possible, I have in mind Paula Scher's comments about the design of public space, and more specifically the Highline Park logo, at her conference at ATypI in 2017:
"In a way, good design, things that are well thought out are codified for rich people, and the poor think they have no place there, and they don't think that design is for them. And I don't know how to overcome that (...)". The MoMA logo succeeds in this balancing act of synthesizing the chic minimalism that delights designers, without sacrificing sympathy in capital thanks to a name that provokes a spontaneous affection that seduces a wide audience. Whether by chance or by genius, this reassuring and welcoming acronym unconsciously accentuates the museum's association with a maternal figure.
What is "accessible" design? The subject is exciting so I share with you the link to the full video of this intervention:

- Opening of a big parenthesis -
As for the Highline Park logo, I don't think the problem is that its design is "too good" for the public. Personally, and even if we can find condescension in Paula Scher's reflection, I find this questioning legitimate and interesting. However, I don't believe in "all-powerful design". There are much more powerful mechanisms than that. The first reason has nothing to do with design, but rather with the gentrification of the neighbourhood, which gradually drives the most modest classes to the periphery.

The second reason may indeed be graphic, and may lie in what the very minimalist symbol unconsciously evokes. Highline park is a green flow built on a former suspended railway line in the Manhattan Borough. The logo designed by Paula Scher is a letter "H" whose double horizontal line also evokes a piece of railway line. However, it is not impossible that other visual connotations may interfere with this very clever, but austere idea. Warning! Warning! This hypothesis is probably very smoky and a little provocative, however I can't resist the desire to share it with you (because sometimes you have to trust your intuition!):

- Closing the big parenthesis -

2019, MoMA gothic becomes MoMA sans

The Typographical Genealogy begun with Morris Fuller Benton's Franklin Gothic in 1902 continues today with the creation of the MoMA sans commissioned by Made Thought Studio.
"Essentially, my pitch in one sentence to MoMA was basically the evolution from Akzidenz-Grotesk to Neue Haas Grotesk. I wanted to do that but with Franklin Gothic as the starting point. And then some just kind-of smoothing it out, a little bit bigger x-height, cleaner lines, a little bit warmer, less old looking. That was essentially the brief. And they found that very interesting. Matthew also said that that sounded like a good place to start, something like that. He was very gracious about his typeface being replaced, which was not of course guaranteed."

I recommend you to read this fascinating interview with Christian Schwartz, designer of the MoMA sans typeface family, through the Type.today website: type.today/en/journal/moma_sans

Minimalism shifts into the "blanding" aesthetic

With the rebranding carried out by Made Thought studio, we are witnessing a new "MoMA" brand that merges the codes of luxury, contemporary art and streetwear. A praise of the brand, MoMA has become a haute couture house where DA stylists follow one another at its head. Or, the MoMA is just a very trendy "store". Access to the discovery of modern art seems to have become a pretext to sell goodies on which the MoMA acronym ensures a certain hype. Bags, sweaters, when are the sneakers? Having been modern before everyone else, MoMA is now caught up in the aesthetics of "Blanding" (neologism created from "bland" and the word "branding" to express the idea of a brand without personality or neutral), an antithesis of branding that far from advocating the distinction of one brand among others, encourages an aesthetic of mimicry.

Branding fever has spread to the institution, and the logo, more than ever at the heart of the communication strategy, is reminiscent of the latest marketing choices made by BURBERRY and CELINE or SUPREME. The objective is the same: to reach a young, urban and globalized population that drinks from the Instagram flows that prescribe stars and brands. MoMA is a cult logo and its aura makes it very tempting to transform it into a design that is gutted and designed to sell cool. Virgil Abloh and Hedi Slimane, today's DA stars as #Blanding apostles. The logo has become culturally more important than the works in the museum.
We live in an era of mass cultural tourism, as prophesied by Andy Warhol in 1975 who noted the following sentence in his diary: "One day, all department stores will become museums and all museums will become department stores."

The rebranding pitch not selected from Hort Studio

The rejected proposal of the Berlin studio Hort is symptomatic of this phenomenon. Familiar with making the big gap between visual identities for cultural institutions and international commercial brands like Nike, the studio has developed a graphic style that gives high priority to experimentation with typography in a falsely amateurist way. Glitch, deformation of proportions, play on readability. The letter is central, expressive and monumental. The answer from the Hort studio was very close to the system made by Made Thought.

The custom typeface "MoMA international" proposed by Hort is also an evolution of the original Grotesk typeface, with a less contrasted and more geometric design. This bias leads to an aesthetic of neutrality very similar to the signage of the New York metro composed in Helvetica and produced in 1966 by Massimo Vignelli.
In this sense, there seems to be a consensus among these studios that the Swiss international style should be the face of modernity.

The Zeitgeist of Western lifestyle is a clever mix of street culture, for the rebellious and alternative side, and codes from design and contemporary art for a good education. The ideal recipe to flatter a well-educated and well-off target who will be able to decipher the references of this aesthetic, and a sufficiently "urban" and "wild" dimension to please the most socially modest commuters.

The "collab", a strategy of success for brands... and for museums

The same exchange of good practices that brings Beyonce and Jay-Z with the Louvre, Supreme and Vuitton, Kayne West and Murakami, Virgil Abloh and IKEA together. This mix of genres forces us to rethink the way we approach graphic design. Is there still a graphic design specific to the world of culture as there were for luxury or rap music? 
It's the concept of street-luxury theorized by Virgil Abloh, a young architect born in 1980 and with a dazzling career, has become the designer that all brands are craving. MoMA's new graphic charter rushes into this "cool bourgeoisie" trend with the use of large white margin (like the new visual identity of the city of Paris) framing visuals representing modern works of art or lifestyle-style mannequins, all straight from a fashion magazine.
In 2019, being modern means above all knowing how to mix codes.

When a museum meets a sock, is it Branding for Millennials ?

Today, making ordinary white t-shirts simply flanked with a logo is the most effective technique to reach the attention of a larger and more diverse population.
It was with this marketing idea that Virgil Abloh quickly became one of the most popular artistic directors on the planet.
This intuition of an inevitable connection between Abloh and MoMA is suddenly validated through an internet search when I discover a sock marked with the MoMA logo, the product of a collaboration in January 2018 between MoMA, Nike and Abloh's Offwhite brand created as part of the exhibition "Items: Is Fashion Modern? »

A brand that ingeniously mixes design, fashion and urban culture, that's the image of MoMA in 2019.
This vision of the image is also shared - as written above, by Virgil Abloh, who bases his work on artistic dialogue with other brands. That's why, when Paola Antonelli, curator at MoMA, sponsors "Items: Is Fashion Modern?", an exhibition that explores 111 clothing and accessories that had a strong impact on the world in the 20th and 21st centuries, she sees Abloh as the perfect ambassador. From there came a collaboration between MoMA, Abloh and Nike, from which 1 pair of sneakers and 1 pair of socks with the MoMA logo were born.
Is culture giving way to the ease of merchandising, or is it taking advantage of fashion brands to reach a young audience, as the world of luxury does with streetwear?
The brand is a passport to cultural claims, as Jeff Staple, streetwear designer and founder of Staple Design, says: "Wearing the brand is like a badge of honor". It allows the wearer to proudly affirm "I am in this category" and in the case of the Abloh x MoMA collaboration, "I understand what I am wearing".

«LOGO» ®

Choosing MADE THOUGHT studio for this identity, as well as a collab with Abloh and Nike, MoMA clearly shows its ambition: to be the supreme brand of museums. It is a most effective way to seduce and attract a young generation that places brands, whatever they may be, at the centre of all their attention.

However, branding an institution, to stand out, to want to blur the lines between culture, luxury and urban fashion, isn't MoMA moving away from its main mission? To be a recognizable cultural institution, which must be sufficiently open to exclude no one. This is an issue for many cultural institutions and that could give rise to a very complex, exciting but also far too long debate for this article.
One thing is certain, it would not occur to anyone now to change this acronym MoMA as it is so iconic and understood by all. So let us be glad that generations of designers will cherish this acronym for many years to come!

L’article Who is the PoPA of the MoMA logo? <br/>Thoughts about contemporary branding est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

Reveal your professional future!

Here are the posters we made for the communication of the open day of the University of Évry which will take place on February 9th.

In order to address the target audience directly, we have created a visual that students can "seize" and make their own. Lift the corner of the poster, it is to let appear perspectives of orientation! This concept also evokes a metaphor of the idea of openness: one raises, opens, reveals one's professional future.

A photo shoot was held with real university students to create the visuals.

Comparative juxtaposition,
a classic of communication

Conceptually, the process of this campaign is classic. This is what can be called a "comparative juxtaposition". Behind this term hides the famous principles of "before and after" or "with and without". Principles that allow the problem and its solution to be presented simultaneously.

This is a process that we had already used in a similar context, but in a different way, for the Université Paris-Est-Créteil open days... Why changing a recipe that works?

In this current case, the "magic effect" also comes from the surrealist interaction between the image (content) and the communication medium (container). An impossible situation that intrigues at first glance.

Behind the scenes

Everything starts with a simple intuition, that of opening the poster as one would open a "door". A quick sketch allows us to quickly check the idea and its potential.

In this case, the challenge was to create in the simplest and most credible way this impossible image where the body of the student had to disappear under the folding. So, unlike David Copperfield who never reveals his magic tricks, here is the explanation of the trick below.

Thanks to the teams of the communication department of the University of Évry for their trust and their involvement in this project. Thanks to the students too!

L’article Évry University open day: reveal your professional future! est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

L’article Happils New Year 2019! est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

A few months ago, we participated in the call for tenders launched by the City of Paris to redesign its visual identity. This is the unsuccessful project we presented. A project far from perfect, conceived on a very simple intuition in a limited time, but which deserved to be presented on this blog.

To give some background information, the specifications were very clear on the fact that it was necessary to preserve but develop the "Nave", the historical symbol of the city. So our work focused first on this symbol.

Fluctuat “Nave” Mergitur

The nave is originally the symbol of the corporation of water merchants, which gave birth to the municipality of Paris. This symbol could be traced back to the Lutetia nautes of the Gallo-Roman era. The nautes were the basis of trade and exchanges between the city of Lutetia and the rest of the ancient world. They were therefore at the origin of the city's wealth. The motto of the city since 1358 was "Fluctuat Nec Mergitur" a Latin phrase, roughly meaning "(It) is tossed by the waves but doesn't sink".

Today, countless representations of this coat of arms co-exist throughout the city. Whether on electrical cabinets, on the pediment of railway stations or at the entrance to parks....

A "nave", a "drakar" or an "arch"?
The graphic translation of this "nave" may have varied considerably over time. If we were to take a critical look at the current drawing, we could note an "aggressive" and "spicy" spirit that brings this nave closer to a Drakar Viking than to a Gallo-Roman nave.

It therefore seemed important to us to restore "softness" and "roundness" to this "nave" in order to make it more of a "welcoming arch" than a warship.

A brand new "nave"...

The drawing of the nave is simplified. Its geometric structure is articulated between the dynamics of the 45° angle of the sail and the asymmetrical flexibility of the hull. The sign obtained will have the necessary visual qualities for its use in both very small and very large formats.

The concept of the logo

Less is more

The trick is to mix the word and the image. The silhouette of the nave being close to the shape of the A, we proposed the audacious choice of replacing this letter with the image. The semantic conjunction of the nave of the coat of arms and the silhouette of the word "PARIS" ensuring the reading of the word. The reading accident becoming the main ingredient of the logo.

It was probably at that very moment that we had to lose the jury for the tender. This combination of word and image, possibly surprising at first sight, was in our opinion a happy encounter. Give as much to see as to read. Let the eye get lost a little to better catch its gaze. There was play and boldness in that logo. Maybe a little too much?

We are already hearing that the reading accident would be too strong and readability would not be guaranteed.
However, all the people with whom we tested this logo read the name the first time. It's just that the trap isn't that complicated. We can tell skeptics that you have to be able to trust people:-)

It was also a logo designed in a responsive way. We all know that words and typography are responsive by nature. This is why typographic logos are naturally more practical to use than complex logos.

The repetition of the sign reveals the 45° angle. The result is a particularly dynamic composition.

The timeless Peignot

The typographical choice deserves to stop for a few seconds. This is the Peignot designed by Cassandre. An emblematic character of the spirit of Paris, since it was designed for the 1937 Universal Exhibition in Paris, and commissioned by Paul Valéry himself, for the inscriptions he wrote for the façade of the Palais de Chaillot, opposite the Eiffel Tower.

In this character, in our opinion, there is all the refinement of Paris expressed in a simple and modest way. Like a typographic oxymoron, combining the Louvre Palace with the Place de la République. And if its institutional character is undeniable, we would have liked to add a more relaxed low-case character to this choice, because as you can see, the Peignot does not have any tiny letters. It is certainly one of the most beautiful designs of capital letters in existence. That's good, since it was a question of working on the visual identity of a capital!

Let us recognize that this typographical choice might seem to go against the current of the frantic use of geometric linear typographies that can be found in almost all visual identities of the last 10 years. On this subject, we are not throwing stones at anyone. But a few grams of full and loose in a world of bullies... it was worth a try!

The graphic universe

At this stage of the project, and always in a limited time, it was a question of developing the graphic universe that could accompany this logo. Intuitively, we played with colours and patterns. A game of rhythm, colour inversions, framing... in short, classic and effective recipes.

But we would have appreciated the opportunity to continue our research. Especially by looking for a less orthogonal, less rigid visual universe.... around these curves and waves from the Nave's design. As if Paris was on the waves... on the move... fluctuating nec mergitur!

There you go. This project will remain in our boxes.

In any case, thank you to the City of Paris for giving us the opportunity to work on this subject. It is not every day that such an opportunity arises.

Congratulations to the agency Carré Noir that won the tender.
You can check their work in the Actu-logo section of this blog.

L’article Fluctuat “Nave” Mergitur! A logo project for the City of Paris est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

In this article we will present you with a visual identity project that goes off the beaten track. An adventure of collective design that was an opportunity to question the role of visual identity outside the traditional institutional and commercial fields. Our challenge was to try to answer the question:

What would a horizontal, participative and inclusive visual identity look like? 

An exciting question that goes far beyond the initial scope of the project and questions co-creation and the notion of authority. Strangely, the word "authority" derives from Latin from Latin auctoritas, meaning the ability to make people grow (verticality!). Anyway... we're not going to tell you everything in the introduction!

We will therefore present you in detail this adventure of the Autre Soie.
The article is long, impatients are allowed to scroll down to discover the design result. For others, we hope that reading this article will inspire you, and that you will want to participate by drawing.

To facilitate your navigation in the article, here is a short summary:

01 : The call for tenders

02 : A participative visual identity

03: The ordinary adventure

04: Participate! 

L'autre Soie, a Third-Place

L'Autre Soie is a project that combines housing, social and solidarity economy and culture in Villeurbanne, near Lyon, France.

Located on the site of a former IUFM (training institution for public education professionals), in the perimeter of the "Carré de Soie" ("Silk district"), it will combine housing reserved for people in difficulty as well as places dedicated to culture and the social and solidarity economy. This project, winner of the European Urban Innovative Actions call for projects, has just been awarded a grant of 5 million euros, which means that the project is innovative!

Behind this utopian project, halfway between social housing and third-place, there is an economic interest group composed of 4 members: Alynea, Aralis, Est Métropole Habitat (EMH) and Rhône Saône Habitat (RSH). They are also accompanied by the CCO, the Villeurbanne Cultural Centre.

At the beginning, there is the intuition that the city is a place of dense and intense interactions where it is necessary to put the human being at the heart of the urban project. It is therefore necessary to rethink the uses of the city, on the imagination of new actions centred on living and doing together. For a city open to all.

The ambition is to make the Autre Soie a creative and attractive place in the agglomeration with a strong citizen involvement in the design and implementation of the project. It will be a district where the inhabitants will be the carriers of resources for the territory. Everyone, in their diversity, will be able to find their place and have a social, cultural and economic environment that contributes to the development of their capacity to act.

In other words, this is not the kind of project that we see emerging every day. In a world where so many borders are closing, this little local utopia is good. A little utopia?.... No, we should talk about great reality, since the project will be financed to the tune of 75 million euros!

Step 01, the call for tenders

When we left the presentation meeting, we immediately went to the site of the Autre Soie. We took advantage of this impromptu visit to meet its current inhabitants.

Indeed, the building welcomed 150 migrants, mainly from the Calais jungle. After some exchanges, and despite the language barrier, we asked them to write "L'autre Soie" in their native language. The name "L'autre Soie" is not easy to understand in French, with its double reading, on the one hand the reference to the Silk district which takes its name from the many textile factories, and then on the other hand this notion of otherness "the other and oneself"... so, not mastering neither the Afghan nor the Syrian, we did our best with gestual explanations.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

At this stage of the project, we had no idea what we were going to do with these words. In fact, we can tell you, we will not do anything about it in the end. Finally, not totally... this meeting had the merit of immersing us very quickly in the subject, and consolidating our motivation to propose a project as utopian and humanistic as their third-place!

The detailed study of the specifications will only reinforce this desire. When reading each line of the document, we conscientiously know the words that converged in the same direction.... Sharing, opening, meeting, social, ecological...

Below, you will find the different notions (cf: otherness, territory, places, third-places...) that we questioned before starting our research.

• 
• 

Values

• Alive
• Innovative
• Dignity
• Integration
• Renovation
• Ecological
• Connected to the city

•

• Participative
• Commitment
• Social
• Respect
• Diversity
• Citizenship
• Patrimony
• Sharing
• Openness

Questioning otherness

Otherness is the recognition of the other in his difference, whether ethnic, social, cultural or religious. Questioning about otherness leads us to wonder about what is other (alter) than us (ego), about our relations with it, about the means of knowing it, about the possibility of existing without it, if it constitutes a threat to our identity.

Otherness is different from tolerance, because it implies an understanding of the particularities of each individual, the ability to be open to different cultures and their interbreeding.

Territory, places and links

The territory can be defined as a real and dreamed space made up of places that are linked together. It includes paths, networks made up of strengths and weaknesses. This space is in interaction with its actors.

A territory is also signs, symbols, words, images inscribed in time. Links or places, what is more visible? Does the multiplication of links make places more visible?

Sharing humanity

Third-places, by facilitating encounters, sharing, innovation, pooling resources, and taking greater account of people and the environmental context, offer relevant spaces for solidarity, value creation and local development.

Space of possibilities

Third-places are spaces of freedom, places of invention and workshops of singular shaping of collective organizations. These are spaces of possibilities.

How can we make visible the links that unite us to others?

To try to answer this question, we had fun in the square next to the office. In addition to the recreational aspect of this experience, it was an opportunity for Jeremy, our apprentice, to experience point tracking under After Effects!

Step 02:
A participative visual identity

After this conceptual analysis phase, we still had to come up with a visual identity project. It's not all about manipulating concepts, we had to propose a tangible project!

We knew that we could not approach this project in the traditional way. We were at the opposite end of the spectrum from traditional branding, and proposing a statutory sign (or even worse "authoritarian") would have been a misnomer.
We had to find an idea as crazy and horizontal as the project!

The idea emerged in one of these long collective brainstorming sessions. At the beginning, there is this idea of the points to connect to draw something. Like in those kids' coloring books.  Then by purifying the idea to its maximum, we came up with the idea that the logo would be an invitation to connect the Other ("l'Autre") to Oneself ("Soi(e)"). In the end, the logo only exists once the points are connected.

And no matter if the dots are physically or mentally connected, it is in this action that the words become signs, and the logo appears. From then on, the person looking at the logo becomes co-author of the logo!

If we push the reasoning, we should share our design rights with all those who have completed this logo! We can reassure you on that, we didn't get rich with this project!
Finally, it should be noted that the rule of the game is not binary, since a third point has slipped into the name. As an invitation to hijack the rule.

A visual identity as a manifesto

A manifesto that makes the link between us and the other tangible and concrete.

A rule of the game that invites us to do it together.

As a collective and participatory work that allows us to question the principle of otherness.

A space of free expression, open and in the making.

Long live participative branding!

The challenges related to the design of a visual identity are numerous. Public image, made up of a set of signs that give it its coherence, the visual identity must simultaneously identify and make a difference, be recognized and set a limit.

This notion also raises the question of visibility, the blurring of identities, the competition between signs in the public space, and conversely, anonymity.

The notion of identity was invariably associated with the logo, with the brand as a unique, versatile sign, because it could be used on any medium. However, this graphic solution has found its limits in the repetition and uniformity it generates.

The logo - as a word with its speakers, code and audiences - is obviously essential. However, we may wonder how to extend and develop this word, how to adapt it to the specificity of the multiple supports that are called upon to carry it in the public space.

Today, we are witnessing a transformation, both in terms of content and form, of the monolithic archetype of the logo that we all know.

Times and needs have therefore changed. No more unique discourse repeated over and over again, and long live the evolution that allows us to take into account the singularity of individuals, projects, periods and events.

Thus the logo of the Autre Soie is continuously reinvented, while maintaining the coherence and recognition necessary for a brand. This participatory identity can therefore be seen as a response in line with its time (cf: more horizontality) where authority is shared. Authority, which can be read as much in the sense of "what confers power to act on others" as in the sense of "the author's authority", the one who "authorizes oneself" and "increases the other".  The two words author and authority being historically and etymologically linked. Authority, height, author... what a strange mixture of vertical words!

A participative audition

At this stage of the project, we were still mere candidates for this call for tenders.  We had to defend this iconoclastic project before an assembly of a dozen people. And a simple PowerPoint presentation would have been counterproductive. So we considered testing our concept directly with them. The objective was that at the end of the presentation, everyone could participate in the production of a brochure on the Autre Soie.

So we landed with our reams of paper, our Posca markers and the office printer, and in 45 minutes we had made about ten unique copies. These are the small A5 brochures presented below.

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A unique typography

The identity is based on the Storno, a typography designed by Lineto.  Its very "standard" design contrasts with the joviality of its large dots on the "i's", thus allowing many graphic games.

It is a typography that exists in only one style. A form of minimalism that limits unnecessary effects within the layout. Therefore, only the word scale will allow to establish reading levels. A constraint that will have disrupted more than one member of the project's steering committee!

We had also imagined a name architecture for the different entities of the project. Probably more of a poetic game than a functional proposal. But at this stage, wasn't it necessary to open up the field of possibilities?

This principle inspired the invitation card for the inauguration....."L'autre quoi ? moi ? toi ? toit ? Soie ?" (The other what? Me? You? You? Roof? Silk? Self?"...)

Communication media

Once the project was selected, we had to implement this identity. So we started by designing the press kit and the invitation. A black and white print on papers of different sizes and colours.

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Step 03:
The ordinary adventure!

The first deadline was the day entitled "The Ordinary Adventure" organized by the CCO. The aim was to invite about a hundred volunteers over a weekend to reflect in "creative marathon" mode on the future orientations of the project. It was a kind of Museomix around issues such as urban planning, housing, participatory gardens, culture for all.... On Sunday, the general public was invited to discover the exhibition presenting their thoughts. We were in charge of setting up the exhibition during the night!

An inaugural gesture was also planned. Since there is no first stone to lay yet, we had suggested that they collectively trace the first link. It was therefore the Director of the CCO and the Director of the GIE who launched themselves first, followed by all the participants. A joyful graphic cacophony as shown in the video below.

There is obviously in this inaugural happening a form of assumed " mess ". By choosing to entrust the pencil to the Other ("L'Autre"), the one who is not a graphic designer for example, you have to accept that his drawing is not as well mastered as if it were made by a professional. That's also what horizontality is all about!

Moreover, it was fun to discover the pictures of the officials in front of this rock n' roll wall!

The exhibition

At the end of the collective reflection day, we had to recover all the teams' productions, then set up the exhibition during the night. Given the time available, and by economic logic, we recycled large grids on the abandoned IUFM site. And then we manufactured and installed the printed panels on the coloured papers. An epic and surreal night, alone in this huge empty building, with the company of a guard and his dog more than nervous.

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Ci-dessus, quelques images 3D pour simuler l'imposition des panneaux.

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The participative workshops

During the day open to the public, we also facilitated a participatory workshop. Visitors, young and old, were invited to freely draw a link between the Other ("L'Autre") and Oneself ("Soi(e)"). The objective is to create a "bank of links" to be used to enrich the future communication of the place.

Another exercise consisted in composing a drawing from a key word (ex: sharing, friendship, living...) on the basis of points, a priori randomly placed on the page. Once the interpretation of the word was finished, we would pass the drawing through the printer, and a quotation would be printed in superposition. The initial points merging with the points of the typography. Well, okay, it's not easy to write about, but Klervi explains it very well in the video below!

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About a hundred drawings were made during the workshop. The system was extended online on the site of the Autre-Soie. Indeed, to access the site, the Internet user was invited to connect the "Autre" to the "Soie" and therefore to draw freely. Here are some examples of illustrations made online!

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Thanks to Uniball for supporting this workshop by providing several boxes of their famous Posca markers free of charge!

Step 04:
Participate!

As mentioned above, the homepage of the Autre Soie site is composed of a drawing module (not available in mobile version). To enter the site, you must connect the "Autre" to  the "Soie". Currently, by default, drawings are not saved automatically, but if you click on "share", then on the Twitter icon, the drawing will be saved and you can get the link to your creation. A link that will look like "https://autresoie.com/?drawing=MTU0NjgwNDIxOS43MzAx"!

All you have to do is copy this link and share it as a comment at the bottom of this page : -)

PS: The website was designed and created by the Lyon-based agency Kolle-Bolle.

Thank you!

We must of course thank our sponsors for the trust they have placed in us. The project was not always easy to grasp and deploy. Thanks to Fernanda Leite and Tanguy Guézo of the CCO, and Françoise Lagarde and Célia Germain of Est Métropole Habitat.

Thanks to Jean-Baptiste Joaton for his help in developing the participatory drawing module.

Thanks also to Klervi, Gaspard and Céline from the Graphéine team who were involved with passion and commitment in this adventure. And thanks again to Posca for their kind material support!

L’article L’Autre Soie, a participative visual identity! est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

As part of our series of History of graphic design and its famous names, here is a portrait of a great lady whose discreet work has helped to save hundreds of thousands of lives in the United Kingdom!

In the 1960s, the increase in wealth brought more and more traffic on the roads. To face this new reality, the government undertook serious highway work. And as cars were moving faster and faster, it was also a question of redesigning all of road signs, which were unreadable at high speed.

This was the mission entrusted to Margaret Calvert(1936 -) and Jock Kinneir (1917 - 1994) between 1957 and 1967. Their work subsequently became a model of modern road signage, replicated worldwide. Thousands of people see their work every day and take these signs for granted, without realizing the scale and revolutionary nature such a project had at the time! Quite like Pierre Novat and the French ski slopes...

From air to asphalt

The future of these designers was born under a bus shelter in 1957. Jock happens to find himself in the same line as David Alford, one of the architects of a second London airport project. The latter, realizing that they were neighbours, offered Kinneir the opportunity to design the signage of Gatwick Airport, which had never been done by anyone before! Jock then hired Margaret Calvert, his student, and offered her her first job.

All-rounders, Calvert and Kinneir also designed the Rail Alphabet typography for the British Rail company, inspired by the Gatwick typography developed for the airport project.

After air and rail, all the road signs in the United Kingdom, starting with the motorways, were handed over to them between 1958 and 1965. It is one of the most ambitious design projects ever undertaken, as Margaret Calvert admits: "It was really innovative. You really believed in it and wanted to be part of it - not in the sense of glory. It was just really exciting to be building it." From these first successful missions, their partnership office, Kinneir Calvert Associates, was created in 1966.

As a first step to underline the urgent nature of this gigantic signage project, graphic designer and typographer Herbert Spencer identified in his magazine Typographica the myriad of existing signs; a visual cacophony such as to threaten the safety of motorists. Ordered by different organizations, the existing typographies and colours varied from one panel to another, generating great confusion, as illustrated by the pictures below.

Below are Spencer's photos. At the bottom right, the new proposal by Calvert and Kinneir.
A whole new visual language is proposed with lower-case letters, a new typography and specific colour codes, adapted to high-speed reading.

Types, signs, panels

Initially, the Ministry of Transport wanted a project in line with what already existed in Germany, namely a white typeface on a black background for motorways, and a font with no German serif character. But the two designers decided to redesign everything in order to adapt as well as possible to the landscape of the United Kingdom.

The woman who designed road signs

Carter created a specific typography in capital and lower case: the Transport. It was more easy to read, in order to recognize road names and signs at high-speed. In 2012, Henrik Kubel created the digital version of the Transport font and 6 new weights, with the help of Calvert.

"We started from scratch, with a specification of the ideal letter shape, after studying other possibilities (including the adaptation of the Akzidenz Grotesk character - a major influence on proportions and overall appearance).
Important details, such as the curve at the end of the lower-case letter l (borrowed from Johnston) and the oblique curved lines of the letters a, c, e, f, g, j, s, t and y, have been specially designed to help maintain the word shape when the letters are slightly spaced; a necessary compromise to compensate for the "halo" effect produced with brightness of the headlights (Much like a Rembrandt portrait - with brush strokes that merge to focus the image). This typography, available in two weights, has been named Transport."

Kinneir & Calvert also created a whole system with different bodies and colours for each group of road signs, following the European protocol: triangles for warnings, circles for instructions and rectangles for information.

Back then, all the work was done by hand, and Calvert explained her need to draw, to connect "head, heart and hand".

As Margaret explains in the video below, there are several elements to consider in this type of creation. First of all, it is not just a matter of creating letters, but mostly a matter of readability on the signs. It is not about typography but about lettering: the characters are designed to work in black on a white background, in white on a black background, or in white on a coloured background. This way, the brain easily recognizes shapes and does not need to read. This reduces the time required to understand the sign.

Margaret also explains that this design project's mission to the general public is to be understandable. The designer has no place to integrate her sensitivity or her personal touch. She also explains that at the time there was no specialisation in graphic design in schools. It was called commercial art. "It's not about fashion, it's purely logical, functional and aesthetic. It couldn't be simpler."

And Kinneir to outbid: "Consistency in design is the visual equivalent of grammar for language."

Margaret drew most of the pictograms, many of which were based on her own life. For example, she relates that the panel "Children crossing over" is based on an image of herself as a child. The cattle warning sign is based on a cow called "Patience", who lived on her cousin's farm in Warwickshire.

Legacy and tributes

Now 80 years old, Margaret Calvert was awarded the title of OBE (Officer of the British Empire order) for her services in typography, graphic design and road safety.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of this signage, MADE NORTH also set up an exhibition at the London Design Museum, involving artists and designers to rethink these famous panels:

Margaret Calvert also recently reviewed her famous "man at work" sign (or "man struggling with umbrella" as she calls it) and transformed it into a "woman at work" print with Jealous Studio.

After this huge road sign mission, Kinneir warned Calvert that these signs will stick to her skin for the rest of her life. She is now indeed recognized as a design icon in Great Britain, and as the woman who created the road signs in the United Kingdom, unintendedly
Calvert describes this project with a sour laugh, as the "nightmare" of her life. Fifty years later, as she walks past her work every day, she cannot help but notice the slightest irregularity. Probably the ordeal of any known designer!

L’article Margaret Calvert: woman at work! How design saved UK’s drivers. est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

As well as our series on the great names of graphic design, we start here a new series on the typographies that have made their mark in the world of graphic design. Here is Typorama, the typographic panorama to explore the world of typography.

The story of Comic Sans... It all started with a dog!

Nothing predicted the Comic Sans MS to become what it is today: a font hated by graphic designers and yet very popular with the general public.

The turbulent history of this typography began in 1994 when Microsoft decided to create an intuitive, fun and illustrative interface to help users use a desktop computer. This future failure was called Microsoft Bob.

This interface allowed us to see our computer as the interior of a house with its different rooms, and it was by this analogy that the user had to become familiar with all the functions of the machine. This made it easier to learn how to store folders, find a program or delete files. And all this, supported by a small yellow dog named Rover, who acted as a mascot and told us how to do it.

American comics as an inspiration

It is because this dog originally communicated in Times New Roman that our story becomes interesting. A typographer passing by found this font cold and unsuitable for this purpose. He then decided to draw a new one. He was inspired by the lettering of American comic strips, in an attempt to mimic handwriting through round, clumsy and irregular forms. He wanted a warm typography that visually emanated a certain orality.

It was therefore in 1995 that this typographer named Vincent Connare created the famous Comic Sans MS. The particle "Sans" underlines its lack of wheelbases while the "MS" refers to its parent company: Microsoft.

The Microsoft Bob software will quickly fail and be abandoned. However, Rover, the little yellow dog, will not take the Comic Sans with him since Microsoft will integrate it as a default typography in its operating system, thus offering it a worldwide reach.

One of the 50 worst inventions of all time!

But what did Comic Sans do to have the privilege of being among the 50 worst inventions of all time according to Time magazine in 2010? Could this be because it has neither italics nor bold, because it has an irregular approach (the approach is the spacing between characters), or because many graphic designers consider it clumsy and childish? Probably.

But that's mainly because it was used in any way for anything. Her immediate popularity made her a star. It has been used everywhere, for everything and often in an inappropriate way: shop windows, e-mails, signs, books or documents of all kinds. Its overexploitation and overly general use has been mocked many times, as is the case, for example, with the site "The Comic Sans Project", which uses well-known logos by replacing their font with the much-loved typography in question.

The paradox of the Comic Sans MS comes from its misuse. The one that was originally designed for a popular computer interface has been propelled to the forefront to become the star of the general public.

It has been taken out of its initial context to become a default typography full of flaws, borrowed from a certain comic.

The Comic Neue

Let us note the existence of a new version of the Comic Sans, but without defect... the Comic Neue. The crushed and strange lines of the Comic Sans have been reviewed and corrected while keeping this simple and childish spirit. Its creator, Australian graphic designer Craig Rozynski, explains that he started this project "as a joke" but ended up taking it seriously as it progressed.

A cleaner, more professional and contemporary font while keeping its childish side. It has been declined in 2 versions with a Comic Neue and a Comic Neue Angular. The result remains anecdotal... a handwritten typography that is ideal for making a birthday invitation on Google-doc this time!

The typography is available for free on the website comicneue.com.

L’article Typorama #01 : The Comic Sans MS est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

Here is the poster we made for the 2018 edition of the Salon du Livre Gourmand de Périgueux (Périgueux Gourmet book Fair).

For 15 years, the Périgord city has hosted the fair in the heart of the historic centre. The history of Périgueux, like that of the Périgord, a region known for its gastronomy, conveys an image of art of living and culture, giving pride of place to the written word. Indeed, even before Bordeaux, it was the first city in Aquitaine to have printed a book at the end of the 15th century.

The Salon du Livre Gourmand de Périgueux has a double vocation: a passion for words and a passion for food. It is an opportunity to celebrate gastronomy from all over the world around various events: tastings, dedications, conferences, demonstrations by great chefs... This event highlights the know-how by welcoming the greatest men of letters and mouths: Ducasse, Bocuse, Troisgros, Hermé... In figures, it is 20 000 visitors over 3 days, a hundred authors, more than 5000 books and 200 events.

The Salon du Livre Gourmand de Périgueux will take place from 23 to 25 November.... For those who want to fill their library shelves and stomachs!

Eat books!

On the theme of this 15th edition, "Faire & Savoir-faire" (to do & to have knowhow), we have created an illustration featuring a "bibliophage": "the one who eats books" (from the ancient Greek φάγος, phágos, "eater"). A colourful, playful and gourmet proposal, whose illustrative style and solid colours offer a contemporary vision of the event.

Other proposals...

A good slice of reading!
This other proposal features a gastronome working on cutting a dish.... This visual places more emphasis on the "do" and adds a human dimension by the presence of a chef.

Fusion cuisine
This proposal illustrates the poetic idea of the fusion between the cookbook and the culinary ingredient. This concept also corresponds very well to the theme "Faire & Savoir-faire". One could have imagined this idea executed in illustration in a simple, colorful and joyful style, like "Matisse"; or in photography, with the hand, the book and the pot in real objects. Contemporary typographical treatment is an integral part of the composition, giving it originality.

L’article Périgueux Gourmet book Fair poster est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

Since last June, we have seen light coffeeshops blooming all over France. Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon... some already had to close their doors, but the craze is there. Following in the footsteps of pioneering Uruguay, followed by the United States and many European countries, Canada will be the next country on the list to legalize cannabis in October 2018.

Cannabis: from stoned to superfood

In these countries, the legalization of cannabis is leading to a new business, which is no longer focused solely on its psychoactive properties. With the emphasis on the superpowers found in this medicinal plant, cannabis is gradually freeing itself from the codes of the kingdom of high. While the seven-pointed leaf has long rhymed with peace & love and displayed the green-yellow-red colours of the Rastafarian flag, the new companies are turning it back to a therapeutic emblem. And who talks about trade also has to tackle branding and packaging.

So how do these new companies get away from the image of "illegal drugs" and move on to that of "miracle plants" image? Hashish and its derivatives dealers and shops seem to be pioneers in their field and can invent new codes for this versatile plant. But before getting to the heart of the matter, let us take you on a journey into the wonderful history of cannabis!

Hemp or cannabis, let's not confuse herbs!

In order to clear up any suspicion, let's start with a little scientific interlude. Nowadays, cannabis is best known for its psychotropic effects, which make it a plant defamed and persecuted by governments, yet it has enjoyed centuries of glory in many civilizations. If cannabis means hemp in Latin, one crucial thing differentiates the two terms. The two related plants have some genes that differ, and are not to be confused. Both produce a significant amount of cannabinoids, the best known of which are tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), a powerful psychotropic, and cannabidiol (CBD) with medicinal properties. It should be added that our body naturally produces cannabinoid receptors, neurotransmitters called anandamide that come into contact and react when taking CBD or THC.

As Jamy explains in the video below, cannabis produces psychoactive resin in quantity (THC, therefore) while hemp has a low THC content but is very rich in CBD. No risk then, to get high on hemp! It is the derivatives of these plants that are generally legalized and sold as food supplements or medicines, as in the United States.

As the Hash Museum in Amsterdam points out, "although cannabis is one of the safest and least toxic recreational substances known to man, its abuse must be avoided as with any substance. However, while cannabis is much less likely to cause harmful effects than, for example, alcohol, its recreational use remains one of the most defamatory, misunderstood and misinterpreted aspects of cannabis in the media."

Hemp has the advantage of being a herb that has been growing wild for centuries and does not require pesticides or water to grow. The fact that it has remained wild for centuries makes it a resistant and adaptable plant for almost everything. It seems to be the perfect way to save the world since it cleanses soils from heavy metals (it currently purifies Fukishima's soils), and can be transformed into biofuel, paper, cosmetics or medicine, insulation, mulching... in short, almost everything. As a textile, it also requires 3x less water than cotton and its fibres are much stronger and insulating, and can be waterproof.
So it's a very good "weed" in a way, which deserves to make a acclaimed comeback. Our ancestors understood this well!

If you want to skip the historical part that will make you an expert on cannabis, you can go directly to the branding section (but you will miss some stunning anecdotes and beautiful images).

The hazy origins of cannabis

Grown for 12,000 years, since the end of the first ice age (prehistoric times), cannabis sativa - or hemp - is one of the first plants domesticated by man! It has valiantly passed through the ages as an adulated, revered or hated, before making a shy but promising comeback today.

The grass people

Cannabis was cultivated first for its fibres from its stems, from which cloth or paper was made, then for its seeds with high nutritional value, hempseed, and later for the medicinal and psychotropic properties of its resin. For lack of evidence, it is not safe for Mesolithic men to have used it to "open their minds" before their rock painting sessions. But it is more likely that they used it to heal themselves than to delirium on the walls... the mystery will remain intact.

The geographical origin of this plant also remains uncertain. It seems that it is nevertheless native to Central Asia, in a region stretching from southern Russia, Mongolia, China and as far as northern India, around the Himalayas. What is certain is that archaeological excavations in China have revealed pottery marked with hemp ropes or an entire plan of marijuana in a 2,700-year-old shaman's grave (which was not a Chinese one), evidence of the plant's multiple uses.

Travelling on horseback with the Eurasian peoples going on to conquer the world, cannabis arrived in the Middle East (more precisely in Egypt), to reach Germany (the famous Hildegard of Bingen cultivated it in her garden and recommended its therapeutic use) and Greece, and later England. It reached the Caribbean by boat with Christopher Columbus in 1492, which will be discussed below.

The 14th century saw the appearance of the first text to prohibit its use in the Ottoman Empire. France, on the other hand, experienced a wave of hashish when Napoleon's troops returned from Egypt in 1801! Hemp had already been introduced by Muslims in the 12th century. After an assassination attempt by a man under his influence, Napoleon had the consumption of hashish banned in Egypt: "the use of strong liquor made by a few Muslims with a certain strong herb, called hashish, as well as that of smoking hemp seed, are prohibited throughout Egypt. Those who are accustomed to drinking this liquor and smoking this seed lose their minds and fall into a violent delirium that often leads them to commit excesses of all kinds." Napoleon later banned its use in France, becoming the precursor of the anti-drug fight.

As for hemp, it enjoyed its heyday in France in the 19th century (as seen on these postcards) before almost disappearing in the 1960s with the arrival of petrochemicals, which advanced its synthetic fibres like nylon, to the detriment of hemp. Today, our country remains the leading producer of hemp in Europe with more than half of the land area (cock-a-doodle-doo!).

Sources: Picturesque postcards from the hemp years in France (Hash Marijuana & Hemp Museum). Illustration of female and male hemp from the book Les Grandes Oeuvres d'Anne de Bretagne (1503)

The thousand uses of the magic plant: conquering the world

Hemp had therefore been used for several centuries in many civilizations. We find its trace in these ancient cultures, in various forms, which we describe here by country.

It was common for many of these peoples to inhale the smoke from cannabis seeds burned during religious ceremonies, such as the Scythians who organized collective fumigation sessions in tents, or to use the plant for its medicinal properties.
For example, traces of seeds and resin have been found in Egyptian sarcophagi. Also in Egypt, the goddess of writing Seshat was represented with a cannabis leaf above her head, to "open the door of the spirit" (see engraving below). Moreover, we can read on the Ebers papyrus several medicinal remedies made from hemp and its seeds, along with other ingredients such as mouse tails, cat hair, goose entrails.... This document is an Egyptian pharmacopoeia with more than 700 remedies and is one of the first documents to mention cancer.

In Japan, hemp was also a luxury material, and samurai used its woven fibre to make waterproof clothing, soaked in khaki juice (see pictures above). In the 14th century, the daimyo warlords encouraged their vassals to cultivate hemp (see this 17th century print, photo Hiroko Tanaka and Junichi Takayasu), and the emperors draped themselves in it. After the Second World War in 1948, under the influence of the United States and its anti-drug lobbies, Japan passed a law criminalizing cannabis possession.

In 1492, far from getting high during the crossing, our dear Columbus owes his discovery of the Caribbean to hemp, of which he had a thousand uses. On period boats, hemp was used to make ropes, weave strong sails, feed people with the seeds stored in the flagpoles, waterproof the soil with leaves slipped between the battens, take notes on hemp paper or even light up with its oil. Moreover, the monument to Columbus in Barcelona is decorated with hemp leaves... what else (photo on the left)?

Sources: Hash Marijuana & Hemp Museum, Museo de la Torre del Oro

The Russians, for their part, were the first hemp exporters in the 18th century. In other words, given the way it was used at the time, Europe is at their feet. Napoleon (decidedly) tried to weaken the English who depended on the Russians by making them sign a peace treaty in 1812. On one condition: that Russia stop trading hemp with England! The more hemp, the more boats. No more boats, no more army... Not crazy wasp. Luckily, the Russians broke the treaty a few years later. To get revenge, Napoleon invaded Moscow, and broke his teeth. We'll hear less about him afterwards.

Healing cannabis, a soft drug

In China, around 1500 BC, hemp was already cultivated for its nutritional virtues and fibres. Bows were made with its rods, revolutionizing archery and armament. But the first references to cannabis as a medicinal plant, which, according to legends, date back to 2800 BC, are mainly due to China, since it appears in the herb encyclopedia of the mythical emperor Shennong, father of Chinese medicine. Shennong bencao jing, unfortunately disappeared, mentions a plant capable of lightening the body and prolonging life. Even today, its symbol Má 麻 representing leaves in a dryer is used in China in words such as anaesthesia (mazui 麻醉) or numbness (mamu 麻木).

It was not until 1839, however, that hemp was introduced as a medicine in Europe by the Irish medical doctor William Brooke O'Shaughnessy. At the time, it was used in cannabis tinctures, infused in alcohol with green tones. Cannabis quickly became the second most widely used ingredient in pharmacies in the United States and Europe until the early 20th century! It was used to fight cramps, hysteria, pain and corns in the feet. The invention of aspirin marked the end of the use of the "green dragon".

In terms of branding, no sign of cannabis leaf on the horizon. The vials and cans are the same as those of any other remedy. It must be said that the Rastafari culture does not yet exist... We will discuss this further below in the religion section.

Source: Hash Marijuana & Hemp Museum

Carl Sagan, an astronomer and essayist / active marijuana user, hypothesizes that in these civilizations, the cultivation of hemp led to the invention of agriculture, and thus the birth of civilizations. On a global scale, the peoples who have taken advantage of hemp owe it a global influence. So where does all this controversy and fear of cannabis come from?

Vade retro cannabis

In the late 1920s in the United States, cannabis was thought to have supernatural powers... but it was defamed for its psychotropic qualities and was soon banned by prohibition. So we used code names to talk about it, and one of his nicknames was "spinach". We invite you to listen to Julia Lee's The Spinach Song: "I used to run away from the stuff, but now somehow I can't get enough. I didn't like it the first time, oh, how it grew on me!"

Moreover, since its creation in 1929, Popeye the sailor man, a great traveller who knew the plants of the world well, regularly consumed spinach. Or was it something else in his pipe? However, in the midst of a prohibition, the government is using a spinach/grass consumer to raise awareness among young people. Nice job.

Source: Hash Marijuana & Hemp Museum

The use of cannabis was finally banned in 1937 in the USA. Of course, it was not only used as a drug and puritanical anti-cannabis lobbies were starting government-backed propaganda to denounce this green demon, this "ticket to psychiatric asylum" said to destroy youth. Synthetic fibres and drugs needed a springboard, and their biggest competitor first had to be destroyed.

It is this fierce fight against cannabis and this image of a murderous plant that crossed the Atlantic and got into people's minds, and is still very well established today. Of course, this plant remains a drug with all associated vices, but we are sure that without this lobbies attack in the 1930s it would surely cause much less controversy among the general public, and its medicinal or textile values would be much more valued, for the benefit of all.

PS: If you like book covers, you can discover our series of 4 articles ranging from treasure books to the first color illustrations, including the invention of the pocket size, the figure of the woman on American paperbacks (like those shown here) and the specificity of the covers of major French publishing houses.

Blessed be the cannabis

There has been talk of the thousand uses of cannabis, not to mention its role in many religions. The sacred plant has performed miracles and converted crowds, probably because of its combined psychotropic and curative effects. Because it's funny, even if it's a little off topic (but not completely, you'll see) we'll take a little look at religions and cannabis.

There are traces of cannabis in Shintoism, Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism, Rastafarianism of course, but also Islam, Catholicism and Judaism, not to mention Shamanism... one wonders why!
In India, cannabis is linked to the cult of the God Shiva, to whom burnt grass is offered. Shiva is said to have created cannabis from her own body to purify the elixir of life. It is also said that Buddha survived by eating one hemp seed a day.
On the Bible side, there are several references to the use of kaneh bosem, an aromatic stem - derived from the word cannabis - as a medicinal plant sometimes used by Jesus as an ointment applied to the heads of the sick. This is evidenced by this mosaic of a Sicilian cathedral, in which Christ cures two blind men under a cannabis leaf. Herbs and incense were also thrown into the fire during masses; it must have been fun at the time.

Among the Rastas, marijuana is emancipatory

Well, of course, whoever says cannabis and religion thinks: Rastafari. This is where we come back to our sheep. 80 years of Rastafarian philosophy have drastically influenced the image of cannabis, and somehow its image. Rasta is one of the only survivors of legal cannabis cultivation (not to mention Sâdhus or other Hindu cults). Obviously, in a world where its use has been prohibited everywhere, the colours green yellow red strike to the point of becoming a symbol intimately associated with the plant.

The Rastafari movement was born in 1930 in Jamaica with the coronation of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia. Prophet in spite of himself, announced by Marcus Garvey as "crowned black king in Africa", he is a sign of the beginning of emancipation from the white oppression. His king's name is Ras Tafarí Makonnen, from whom the Rastafari cult derives. Jamaica, at the time, wasn't a party land. Since May 3, 1494, when Christopher Columbus discovered this new land, Jamaica has been colonized by the Spanish, its people enslaved and its lands exploited. When there is a shortage of labour, slaves from African countries are brought in en masse. Then the British pirates settled in and finally gave way to an empire of planters and slaves, under the English crown. The island gained its independence in 1940, after more than 500 years of alienation, while retaining its status as a member of the Commonwealth.

All this to explain the context of resentment against "Babylon", the white empire, and the desire to emancipate oneself. The very title "religion" does not suit Rastafarians, who do not like labels, derived from the Babylon system. More generally, they believe it is wrong to worship profit-oriented institutions. Any Rastafarian who respects himself above all respects Nature: unprocessed food, no or little meat, and hair that is allowed to grow like a sacred fleece. Some people choose not to smoke marijuana to maintain their integrity! Cannabis is exclusively consumed during religious rites, to enter into trance and communion with Jah (God, Jehovah's contraction), and the universe. In any case, consuming this herb outside religious ceremonies is frowned upon by the Rastafari community. It also suffers from this image of a stoned kingdom, wrongly attributed.

Banning and prohibiting the use of this "plant of wisdom" or "sacred herb" is an example of Babylon's immoral sense of seeking to control nature, which no one should possess. For Rastafarians, smoking cannabis, this good wild weed and gift of nature is also a way to resist the system of thought. The only problem is that the plant is not endemic to Jamaica, since Christopher Columbus brought it back during his travels! Big scoop, it's not written anywhere and I had a brainwave when I wrote this article: the Rastafari cult is therefore based on a plant... imported by Babylon! Strangely enough, everyone remembers that Columbus brought death, but no one remembers his importation of ganja.

Once revered and used in all its forms, then cornered and banned in almost all peoples, cannabis now seems to be gradually reborn from its ashes.

The branding of cannabis, between leaves and flasks

Source: it's nice that

Today, with the progressive legalization of the plant in many countries, cannabis needs to be rethought. First, because it is a question of getting rid of this erroneous vision in Rastafari colours that sticks to it, and second because cannabis is no longer sold only for its narcotic properties, but also for its medicinal properties. It is all the more a question of moving from an image of an illegal drug to a serious miracle plant. Each use has its own image, but here again it is not so simple.

The graphic designers of the new world of grass have a still unexplored land before them in terms of branding, but often limited by over-framed legislation and the counter-image conveyed for 70 years by lobbies. Should the cannabis herb always appear on the packaging or in the logo? How to build a serious and medicinal brand around this type of product? With which codes should a brand of THC-containing derivatives be built?

Legislation and packaging restrictions

In terms of legislation on psychotropic products, Canada will face a whole range of signage that is very similar to that found on cigarette packages. It will feature a cannabis leaf symbol on a red background, and health warning recommendations.

In terms of functionality, also valid in the United States, the packaging must also be child-resistant (difficult to open) and not have attractive names for the kids. The species "Girl scout cookie" or "Bubblegum" are prohibited for sale.

For other products without THC, the legislation is more flexible. Products must indicate that they contain cannabis, but can quite visually be confused with traditional products: cosmetics, chocolates, massage oils...

My herbalist is high!

The branding of today's cannabis is designed around a target but also a point of sale. Potentially, graphic designers must keep in mind that tomorrow we could find this kind of derivative products at Starbucks or on the Monoprix shelves (one day)! For the time being, the products are directly inaccessible to the general public, highlighted on the Internet or presented on well-kept shelves like a pharmacy.
Specialized retailers most often adopt a minimalist and high-end space design that is reminiscent of that of herbalists or apothecaries. Counter with multiple drawers, refined atmosphere, vials, plants at your disposal to smell them... We are clearly in a space reserved for the same consumers as those in urban cafés, minus the tattooed baristas.

Some stores in the United States

Each product has its own style

By analyzing the various existing brands of products containing CBD or THC, we identified several brand positioning options. In the marijuana family I would like....
May we introduce you?

1 - Apothecaries' cannabis

This positioning imagines products that are inspired by the visual codes of the pharmaceutical world. For example, the Floramedex brand has taken over the symbol of the pharmaceutical cross by mixing it with a cannabis leaf. The colours are generally sober and unadorned, we are not here to have fun but to heal. One could imagine that this branding style is limited to food supplements and CBD-based products, but cannabis in all its forms, from chocolate to dyeing to THC smoking grass, can be found there. Ritual drops, for example, use vials like those of former herbalists. This type of product gives a reassuring and medical image, sober and measured, to be taken to the nearest gram.

2 - Indie / holistic cannabis

For nature lovers and adventurers. We will find here warm and natural colours, patterns, images of plants or holistic symbols, heralding inner journeys. This type of branding conveys a bohemian image, focused on a return to nature, for a complete sensory experience. It mainly targets women seeking inner well-being. Good Fortune joints, for example, are presented in packaging that recalls tarot cards, and use iridescent colours, and even pure gold, for a mineral and spatial look. The National Holistic Centre reminds us with its natural visuals that this place is a welcoming cocoon, close to people and nature.
Branding here acts as an omen that these joints and by-products will connect you to your mind, and make you live a strong psychic experience.

3 - Offbeat, fun cannabis

For cool people. Products with a young image, with bright colours, illustrations, offbeat photos, symbols... to have fun above all, without counting. These products are part of the heritage of the peace & love movement of the 1960s (like the Woodstock brand's herb that uses the codes of the festival's poster of the time) while adapting to our times. The Leafs by Snoop (Dogg) brand uses gliding images and sober packaging to experience "elevation" and invite you to travel "in the air". A not really low cost trip since Snoop called on the Pentagram agency to brand its brand (Moreover, the agency seems to be well immersed in the product because it also produced the packaging for the Woodstock grass, and Harmony Extract). The Italians of Almamaria called on the illustrator Mateo Manenti to design their animal and offbeat packaging.
Without falling back into Rastafari codes, these brands offer fun cannabis without any headache.

4 - Healthy cannabis

Do you like cannabis as a superfood? Here is the most striking example. Halfway between a pleasure, gourmet and healthy product, this kind of "healthy" cannabis positioning makes you want to treat yourself. A little like indie cannabis, there are illustrations and natural visuals. Here, the product is highlighted, as well as its ingredients. These are often organic brands, and the codes are the same as for this kind of products: eco-designed packaging, raw materials, plant visuals, soft colors... Would you like to have some more chocolate?

5 - High end cannabis

We could have just pushed the doors of the Bon Marché. Here, everything is only luxury, calm and voluptuousness. The chocolates are covered with gold, are wrapped by hand, and the slightest vial of oil is presented in a box worthy of a great whisky. Art, gilding and craftsmanship overlap to bring the ultimate in terms of cannabis derivatives. The ingredients are also highlighted as for "healthy" cannabis, but the staging is different. To whom it may chocolates are not just cannabis chocolates but "luxury artisanal cannabis chocolates". Moreover, they are staged in artistic settings, alongside luxury objects and art. Lord Jones products are handcrafted in limited quantities for "Your Royal Highness". The ultimate in craftsmanship serving cannabis. We would almost forget that we consume products with psychotic substances.

6 - Beauty cannabis

A little in the same vein as pharmaceutical cannabis, but mixed with healthy codes, here is cosmetic cannabis. Here, minimalism and health are required. These products are presented above all as high-end beauty products with active natural ingredients. We owe the branding of the Seven Point brand to Tortilleria, the same agency that created FloraMedex (see category 1). White on black, or fluorescent on white, the colours are in touches, effective and impactful. The shape of the packaging boxes is reminiscent of Leafs by Snoop. Again, the presence of cannabis herb is rarely found in the visuals, or treated graphically. On the presentation side, we would store these products on our sink rim, without even being pinched by the drug squad.

That's it, that's it, our tour de piste of the many faces of cannabis is over. Hoping that you have relaxed well, and that you are now looking forward to being able, perhaps one day, to make the branding of a (legal) CBD-based product!

Sources:

The history of hemp:
http://www.nuntisunya.com/histoire-chanvre/
http://hashmuseum.com/en/the-plant/medicinal-cannabis/history-of-medicinal-cannabis
http://hashmuseum.com/en/collection/medicinal-marihuana
https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends-asia/magu-hemp-goddess-who-healed-ancient-asia-008709?nopaging=1
https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/cannabis-journey-through-ages-003084
http://hashmuseum.com/en/collection/making-hash
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_du_chanvre
http://almamaria.it/#/Home
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3358962/

Cannabis and Rastafari:
https://pointsadhsblog.wordpress.com/2015/06/11/the-use-of-marijuana-in-the-rastafari-religion/

Napoleon, Columbus and the hashish:
http://www.napoleon-empire.net/bonaparte-drogue.php
http://hashmuseum.com/fr/collection/colomb-et-le-cannabis
http://www.linternaute.com/histoire/jour/evenement/3/5/1/a/47983/christophe_colomb_debarque_en_jamaique.shtml

Hemp profits:
https://www.zamnesia.fr/blog-la-difference-entre-chanvre-et-cannabis-n1080
http://lemuseedufumeur.net/le-chanvre-pour-assainir-les-sols/

Cannabis and religion:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_spirituel_et_religieux_du_cannabis

A "tripping" website:
https://benicepaper.com/

L’article Cannabis branding: a green history est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

The little story of the Bluetooth logo

Everyone knows the "Bluetooth" logo, but do you know the origin of this name and its logo?
It is a unique story, much deeper than it seems. Personally, I've always taken that name for a kind of funny and offbeat joke.

In an article published in the Reddit thread, a user shares the roots of the emblem of this technology. The Bluetooth logo would be the combination of the letters "H" and "B", the initials of King Harald Bluetooth (in Danish "Harald Blåtand") written in the runic script used by the Vikings.

Below: The runic alphabet or futhark - a term formed from the name of its first six letters - is an alphabet that was used for the writing of Germanic languages by peoples speaking these languages, such as the Scandinavians, Friesians, Anglo-Saxons, etc. There are also Hungarian and Turkish runes, two independent systems (Source: Wikipedia).

Then why did Intel engineers dig up a Danish king to name their technology? 

In 1996, Jim Kardach, an Intel engineer, worked on the development of a system that would unify phones with computers using wireless communication technology. At this point the proposed names look like Biz-RF, MC-Link or Low Power RF! In other words, names as unoriginal as "Microsoft" compared to "Apple". All these names will be rejected by the legal department because of their too generic names. This is where a Danish collaborator from Kardach talks to him about "Harald with blue teeth", the king who unified Denmark and Norway between 958 and 987.

The name was there, with the promise of unification of electronic devices at the same time.
A great example of successful naming!

From then on, the logo appeared very quickly by combining Harald Blåtand's initials: (Hagall) (ᚼ) and (Bjarkan) (ᛒ).

Source: The cover illustration is from a creation for a t-shirt for sale on www.threadless.com/designs/king-harald-bluetooth.

L’article The story of Harald with blue teeth! est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

The poster of the festival, alongside those of previous editions. A fruit basket, a thriving jungle, a surprise cake and a Mexican rock calavera.

An explosive visual

For this edition of Pérouges Spring Festival, marked by Johnny Hallyday's death, we light fire with explosive cherries! Following the same artistic direction as in previous years, Jonas made the best of his origami skills to give life to the juiciest fruit of spring, cherry.

Explosions, matches and poppies - the emblem flower of the music festival - gush against a sparkling yellow background.

New in 2018, the typography has been re-drawn by hand for this edition of the festival.

PS: To review the mexicano-rock poster of the 2017 edition, and the paper art of the previous editions, it's here.

Concept:

Creating the paper elements:

Final poster:

Some colour and layout research:

And a preview of the festival program, in which we created illustrations by hand to highlight information.

See you next year!

L’article “Pérouges Spring Festival” lights fire in 2018 est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.

Even though Germany was eliminated from the 2018 World Cup, there is no reason not to talk about Bauhaus and sausages. Especially since we are soon celebrating the 100th anniversary of the creation of this school in Weimar (the Bauhaus school, not the sausage school), and the digitisation of several forgotten Bauhaus typographies, thanks to the graphic and digital work of 5 students supported by Erik Spiekermann.

100 years of Bauhaus architecture

First of all, remember to read our latest article about Bauhaus to better understand what we are talking about here!
Graphéine collaborated with Adobe on the project "The Hidden Treasures Bauhaus Dessau". The Lyon team created the logo challenge, creating the Bauhaus Football Club logo (image below) and the jerseys for the design team that we invented in our Bauhaus article.

The poster challenge was taken up by our Paris team, which we reveal in this article.

Architecture and typography in our Bauhaus posters

This first poster produced by Graphéine Paris evokes the great similarities between architecture and typography through a fictional exhibition celebrating the 100 years of Bauhaus. Typography and architecture, of the same rigour, leave nothing to chance. As Virgninia Smith explains in her article about the modern marriage between architecture and typography, "graphic design reproduces in miniature what architecture creates monumentally".

Here, the Joschmi typography takes up the construction and lines of the Bauhaus Archiv, a museum building designed in 1979 by architects Walter Gropius and Alexander Cvijanovic to house the Bauhaus archives.

Also to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, we wanted to pay tribute to Joost Schmidt, to whom we owe the Joschmi typography, recently resurrected by Adobe. Joost Schmidt was a student at the Bauhaus in Weimar before becoming a young teacher at the Dessau school.
He learned wood and stone sculpture in the specialized workshop, then taught calligraphy, directed the workshops of sculpture, advertising, typography and printing, drawing, as well as the photography department. We owe him the famous poster of the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition (right image, below).

In this second poster, we wanted to take advantage of the modularity of the Joschmi font to write both 100 & Joost. The maximum color contrast draws attention to the graphic tip. Clever!

100 years of Bauhaus sausages

And since the Bauhaus was founded in Germany and Germany is the land of sausage, we have devoted a small series of posters to glorify Bauhaus and sausage in all its forms.

As you are probably hungry, here is our tribute to the Fleishwurst, the Dauerwurst and the Weißwurst, respectively from left to right on the photo and our posters.

The red sausage:

Fleischwurst (literally 'meat sausage') is a cooked and smoked sausage with a dense flesh, served in the form of a horseshoe. We also call her Lyoner Wurst... because of her Lyonnaise origins! It is stuffed with pork and bacon with a little garlic, and spices. We eat them in salads or sandwiches. Be careful to first remove the skin, as it is not edible.

The dark brown sausage:

Dauerwurst (dry sausage) is, as its name suggests, a smoked sausage. Nothing very special to tell about this sausage, except that it allows to make very beautiful posters and that it certainly has very good taste. You can also find it in spicy version, nice!

The white sausage:

Weißwurst ("white sausage") is said to taste much better than it looks. Cooked, it is stuffed with veal and pork bacon mixed, seasoned with parsley, onions, lemon and spices. The white sausages are eaten in pairs, just drained, with a large pretzel and sweet mustard. If you want to eat it Bavarian, cut the end and suck the stuffing out of it (very chic). Traditionally made the same morning and without preservatives, they are generally eaten as snacks before noon.

Ah, German gastronomy! We hope you enjoyed learning about Bauhaus and sausages, and we wish you great festivities in 2019 (and maybe a trip to taste it all) to celebrate the 100th Bauhaus anniversary.

PS: to learn more about German sausages, check out the German Sausage Guide !

L’article Bauhaus posters and sausages for the 100th Bauhaus anniversary est apparu en premier sur Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon.