Cécile et Roger’s new exhibition identity features a singular font that folds out into six more

Since we last caught up with Cécile Nanjoud and Roger Gaillard of Swiss graphic design studio Cécile et Roger, the pair have been immersing themselves in a world of type. They’ve established the Extraset type foundry in 2019 alongside a collective of Geneva-based designers, started the Affichage Public Association to celebrate Swiss graphic design through posters, all the while continuing to fill their portfolio with very sleek (and very Swiss) type design projects.

A recent typographic challenge for the team came in the form of a brief from the Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts of Lausanne (Mudac) – the visual identity for a retrospective on the museum’s archive of French-speaking Swiss design. The project involved a series of conferences and events in a changing exhibition space that would evolve to explore six different themes within the archive over a six-month period. Presenting historical material from the collection, the museum wanted a playful and simple design system to tie the show together that meant “both informed and uninformed visitors could get to grips with the subject”, says Celine. “As a result our aim was to create a graphic system that could be malleable and potentially evolve over the duration of the event.”

For the project’s six subsections, the studio produced a single typeface that could morph into six distinct fonts. But before they started working on typography, the studio simply experimented with lines and shape to find possibilities for a generative element. Roger says: “During this development, we produced modular forms that could be adapted to various elements. The result is an organic and variable graphic language. As we worked more on the lines, applying this to a basic Latin capital letter skeleton, the visual identity of the event came to us,” he says.

The decision to develop this colour-coded mark-making into individual variants of a typeface for the six themes resulted in a lively set of experiential letterforms. All with a DIY look and feel, the various fonts acted as a toolbox to differentiate phases of the project as well as different events in the space. Inspired by both textures of analogue and digital materials, the graphic forms for each font were modular enough to maintain an overarching identity over the course of the exhibition. Their distinct shapes spilled out into the pattern making across the walls and floors of the gallery, and on exhibition ephemera.

Led by letterforms, the aim of the variable identity project for the museum was “to give a vision of a living, changing archive that is part of a shared heritage”, says Celine, “the purpose of the space we have created is to invite the public to get to grips with the issue of archiving, so we had to create a place engaging enough for people want to spend time there and come back.”