On pur pose, we turn words into puz zles, to in ... - Les Graphiquants

lines
of
com
muni
cat
ion
by vÉronique vienne
to get its message across,
wants to change
a Parisian design studio
the way we read.
béjean
This unsigned poster—by pascaL
Les Graphiquants and
by
FranÇois Kenesi—has
appeared at 900 publictransit
stations in France. porTraiTs
42 print 66.5 october 2012 printmag.com 43

Les Graphiquants’ posters
for recent dance and
music biennials in Lyon
I
n 2009, after just a year in
business, the principals of a small
design studio in Paris called Les
Graphiquants decided to print a
brochure of their work. They created
a handsome 42-page, four-color
presentation showing examples of their
best posters and brochures as well as some
of their personal projects. It was all very
impressive and beautifully laid out, save
for the fact that the writing—all of it, including
the captions—was in Lorem ipsum
dummy text.
It was surreal: every heading, subheading,
blurb, footnote, and photo credit was
carefully and elegantly handled in Latin.
(Take that, David Carson!) I called Les Graphiquants’ office and
asked Cyril Taieb, one of its four principals, what sort of feedback
they got on the brochure. “Friends loved it!” he said, adding
that the work should speak for itself—and that, anyway, nobody
ever reads what’s written in these things.
“You don’t think that readers want to know the name of the
project or the client?” I asked. “It’s irrelevant information,” he
said. “So quickly forgotten.” We were on the phone, but I could
tell that he was shrugging his shoulders.
That was three years ago. Today, Les Graphiquants (in French,
the name suggests that they are graphic “traffickers”) are one of
the largest independent graphic design studios in Paris, with
enough work to keep close to a dozen people on the payroll. The
list of their clients includes the Centre Pompidou, the French
cultural ministry, Canal+, and a handful of prestigious music
and dance festivals. In fact, their work seems to pop up everywhere
these days, which has led some of the city’s more established
designers to dismiss it as “stylistic” or lacking substance.
The graphic designer Pascal Béjean shares some of these reservations
but has nonetheless found himself won over by the
studio’s output. (He took the portraits seen on these pages.) “Even
though I somehow feel that these guys’ work can be a bit too slick
or too trendy,” he says, “there is always something that draws me
to it—whether it’s the composition, the typography, the intricacies
of the layout, or their photographs. They started so strong,
so now I am expecting greater things from them in the future.”
Les Graphiquants’ principals are not fully comfortable with
the attention that their work has received. “We have trouble defining
what we do,” Taieb says. “Giving interviews is torture. We
are deadly afraid of sounding pretentious.” This is practically
unheard of in France, where failing to develop a complex discourse
to explain your work is frowned upon—particularly among
Parisian designers, who sometimes seem to spend as much time
justifying their approach as they do delivering the goods.
But being tight lipped about explanations does not preclude
having a well-defined point of view, and Les Graphiquants certainly
have a distinctive signature. Their work is steeped in levity.
Over and over again, their designs seems to defy gravity and float
on the page in breathless suspension. As the design critic Vanina
Pinter told me, “they always manage to evoke buoyancy,” an effect
that she ascribes to “a deceptively simple interaction between
flat surfaces and playful letterforms.”
Recent posters for the Lyon Dance Biennale are a perfect example.
In them, leaping dancers are frozen midair among swarms
of what look like golf balls. “We love to create ‘clouds’ of objects
whose weight becomes insubstantial,” says Maxime Tétard, another
of Les Graphiquants’ principals. “We play with
counterintuitive perceptions. We encourage viewers to question
their expectations.”
The golf-balls theme, which they call “molecules,” is part of a
larger field of research: the study of self-generating figures. Tétard
and Romain Rachlin, who act as Les Graphiquants’ art directors
(Taieb handles communications and production, and the fourth
principal, François Dubois, is in charge of multimedia work),
share a passion for experimental geometry. They are obsessed
with folded-paper shapes, patterns made of randomly assembled
solids, and handsome letterforms that look like they have been
punched out by a cookie cutter or popped out of a cake mold.
Tétard and Rachlin like to say that they are herding forms,
much as a shepherd does his flock. They collaborate with the
material world, coax and cajole it, rather than try to bridle it.
They hate to force things into existence. Indeed, the studio's most
memorable work to date, a series of viral posters that have now
made their way into just about every subway and train station in
France, came about by accident.
In 2009, a company called Metrobus, which is responsible for
placing billboards at bus stops, train platforms, and subway corridors,
didn’t have enough posters to fill all the available spaces.
(Dwindling advertising budgets, victims of the ongoing financial
crisis, were to blame.) The photographer François Kenesi, a friend
The studio has created
its own typefaces for
several projects, including
L’alsace (left) and
Lorraine (below).
“We have troub le defining
what we do. Giving
inter views is tor ture.
We are deadly af raid of
sound ing pre tentious.”
44 print 66.5 october 2012 printmag.com 45

above: installation and
wall text for a Valérie
Mréjen exhibition at the
centre pompidou
of Metrobus’s advertising director, happened to be in Les
Graphiquants’ studio one afternoon when he saw, lying on the
floor, large scraps of heavy blue paper crisply folded into interlocking
triangles. “This is it!” he said.
“The combination of ordinary paper with sublime geometry
seemed utterly contemporary,” Kenesi says. He took pictures of
the folded broadsheets and pitched to Metrobus the idea of using
these abstract forms as decorative murals to fill the empty
advertising panels. The idea was a hit, and the unsigned posters,
realized through a collaboration between Kenesi and Les
Graphiquants, have since cropped up all over France. “They have
become the symbol of a generation for whom open-source contributions
are the norm,” Kenesi says.
The spare Metrobus posters may be typical of Les Graphiquants’
unforced working methods, but the lack of typography is unusual
in their work, which normally flaunts the playful use of type.
Indeed, the studio has never really abandoned the irreverent, almost
combative attitude toward type that characterized its early
Lorem ipsum stunt. To its critics, the resulting designs can sometimes
look like doctors’ eye charts, with words broken in such a
way as to create patterns of evenly spaced capital letters. Visuals
are treated as background texture, to add a layer of mystery rather
than to enrich the message. “On purpose, we turn words into
puzzles, to invite readers to find a different pathway into what it
means,” Rachlin says.
This concern is not new. A century ago, the Dutch typographer
Piet Zwart was already advocating changing the way people read.
Like him, Les Graphiquants believe that reading should be an
opportunity to “see” the message as a novel experience. In order
to prevent the impression of déjà vu in viewers, the designers like
to subvert the meaning of a word with odd fractures that create
unexpected visual puns. But even though they often push the
limits of legibility, the results always manage to make sense.
A good example is a recent poster for a music festival that reads:
LI–BER T E
CU¯RIO –
- SI¯TE
MO¯D -
- ER NIT¯E
Here as elsewhere, viewers may find themselves “subvocalizing”
the text of the poster—not just scanning the words but
pronouncing them internally as well. This is an intentional strategy
on Les Graphiquants’ part. “Sometimes I propose we make
spelling mistakes to force people to read aloud what’s written,”
Tétard says. “Weird spelling is poetry. Romain, who is more rational,
doesn’t always agree with me.”
Forcing viewers to sound out words can also be achieved with
uneven spacing between letters, abstract ligatures, and subtle
variations in the intensity of colors. “We like to draw, refine, and
express the more graphic qualities of words,” says Tétard. “But
sometimes we have to pressure the letterforms and bend them
slightly out of shape to convey a more effective, articulate, and
audible message.” Rachlin agrees: “We often find ourselves in a
situation in which we have to strike a compromise between new
and old—between the expected and the surprising. We tend to
favor solutions that allow us to steer clear of visual clichés in order
to create unfamiliar wordplays.”
Facing a Les Graphiquants poster, one can feel like a child
learning to read. Why bother? Because subvocalizing actually
helps people understand, evaluate, and remember what they
read. In our usual haste to absorb meaning and move on, we
right: Les Graphiquants
in 2011. From left: cyril
Taieb, Maxime Tétard,
romain rachlin, and
FranÇois Dubois. below:
their catalog for “chefsd’œuvre?,”
a 2010
exhibition at the centre
pompidou-Metz.
seldom fully process text. By restoring the auditory experience,
Les Graphiquants are doing their small part to renew the oral
tradition and, with it, a more personable form of communication.
At least, that’s the argument—one that is not lost on clients,
who are always trying to find new ways to create buzz, to get people
to talk about their message.
Turning reading into a mind game might be considered elitist.
Les Graphiquants are the first to admit that, in some circles, clients
still insist on a more straightforward presentation. “We are
sometimes accused of being ‘too Parisian,’ ” Taieb says. “In the
mouths of some people, it’s the ultimate put-down.”
Keeping any such hints of elitism in check may be the key to
Les Graphiquants’ continued success. The new French president,
François Hollande, declared recently that he wants to democratize
high culture. Make it more accessible and less ambiguous.
Promote it to a wider audience. Entice more people to buy theater
tickets and attend experimental ballet performances. This
could be good news for Les Graphiquants. In France, the man
on the street loves to feel clever. If the studio can continue to
challenge viewers without putting them off, and to combine buoyant
compositions with complex typography, then there’s no telling
how far it may go. ▪
“On pur pose, we turn
words into puz zles, to
in vite readers to find
a diff erent pathway
into what it means.”
For a 2012 Gerhard
richter retrospective at
the centre pompidou, the
firm used mirrored paper
silkscreened with varying
amounts of black ink.
46 print 66.5 october 2012 printmag.com 47