Research for the visual identity of the cultural center CentQuatre-Paris

A few months ago, we participated to the consultation for the visual identity of CentQuatre-Paris. As we usually do on this blog, we present you our unsuccessful creative ideas.

The CentQuatre, a city place

Located in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, the 104 is a cultural center including a space of residences, production and diffusion for the public and the artists of the whole world. Conceived as a collaborative artistic platform, it gives access to all the current arts, through a popular, contemporary and demanding program. An atypical place to live, lined with stores, it also offers spaces for free artistic practices and early childhood. For the start-ups that integrate its incubator, it constitutes a unique territory of experimentation, at the crossroads of art and innovation.

After 10 years of fruitful and growing activity since its creation and a strong development both in terms of attendance and influence, the CentQuatre now wishes to position itself as an alternative cultural institution resolutely turned towards innovation and emergence.

Research 01: The Breakup

In this research, we started with the number 104, and we treated it in a minimalist way, with a simple game of shift revealing the number 4. This visual artifice creates an effect of movement, and allows to hang the logo at the caesura of two zones. Then, it only remains to play with this lag, with a multicolored language, in the image of the eclectic artistic programming of this cultural place.

Track 2: The building

Settled in old halls, discreetly hidden behind a voluminous entrance porch, the architecture of 104 is impressive, beautiful, simple... But you still have to go and meet it! In this second research, we made the choice to put forward the architecture of the cultural center.

The name "104" is unexpected, mysterious, enigmatic, poetic, arbitrary, contemporary... Semantically, if it leaves you dreaming, we would like it to tell us a little more about this place.

With an iconic place and an iconoclastic name, we proposed to associate the place and the name by a game of fusion between the pictogram and the typography, the name becomes the image of the place (and conversely).

The sign is used as a word. It is aligned on the basic line of the text. For the sake of proximity the name is written in its simplest form, without capitalization.

If you want to discover the project that was chosen for the new visual identity of the 104, it is a work by Ruedi and Vera Baur.