Identity¶
Reference¶
The typography and logo use Syne made by the studio bonjour monde.
Source Syne is a 5-style type family originally designed in 2017 for the art center Synesthésie, based in Saint-Denis in the very close suburb of Paris, France. Used across their identity, print and screen, Syne has been released under open-source license in June 2018.
Syne Regular is a geometric sans, inspired by many standards of the genre but presenting quite condensed vertical proportions — short ascenders, descenders and uppercases — for a sturdy yet pleasant feeling in longer texts. It also features minimalistic diacritic marks, reduced to the simplest form to only signify a presence.
The Mono cut is built upon the Regular but has been strongly distorted with DataFace, a little program we made based on the classic FontTools library, that allowed us to automatically switch all on-curve points into off-curve ones and vice-versa. It gives the type’s contours a unique treatment, mixing arcs and straight lines in a completely unorthodox and vivacious way. Bringing together History and the technical essence of nowadays typography, these two styles both integrated a part of surprise in their design process, a desired lost of control, an acceptance of error to bring out shapes that pure drawing would fail to imagine.
Imagining Syne has been a very exciting exploration, driven both by fun and serious interest in the many questions it raised. We took time to consider not only the importance of a custom type as main vector of an identity, but the meaning of the idea of family in typography. We ended up seeing it somewhat similar to the artistic gesture of Ready-Made, or Found Object, perfected by Marcel Duchamp in the early 20th century: not that the family preexists the designer, but that the mere fact of gathering fonts and calling them “family” can be most of what makes it a family, more than any objective resemblance. We think of Syne as an assemblage of personalities — they can live all together, in small groups or on their own and will always create a surprising and distinctive visual situation.
Identity¶
Others test with Dataface, software create by bonjour monde too before finally going back at the typography Syne. Some explanation for using it here.