Logo and Identity — version 0.1
The Guignard Foundation’s graphic identity is founded on a meditation on modes of writing – by hand, invented, graphical, digital, collective, secret, by various hands, etc.. The resulting identity project’s aim is to constitute a compendium of the written forms of everyone involved with the foundation, not only the graphic designers commissioned to create the identity, but also the artists it supports, as well as the people involved in it. It is hoped that it will come to constitute a sort of typographical heavenly body, accumulating over time that will serving to problematize issues of hierarchy, expertise, knowledge, norms, conventions, habits, readability, etc..
The identity’s two basic typographical fonts are Coconat – which you are now reading – designed by Sara Lavazza and whose slightly flared calligraphic design displays unconventional curves, and DINdong designed by Clara Sambot, which is a “dodgy” reinterpretation of the DIN font, subversive of its “normal” and normative characteristics. The two fonts are published under free licence, which implies that they may be freely modified and that these new variants may then also be freely shared. In this way, such free fonts form part of an ecosystem favourable to open and collective projects.
As time goes by, hand-written letters will be added to the logo and the fonts.
The Foundation Guignard in a line:
Two-line logo variant:
Three-line variant:
Four-line variant:
Other variants:
As time goes by, handwritten letters will be added to the logo and fonts.
Inspirations
The identity is inspired by a range of objects, practices and figures, gathered from the realms of graphic design, art, cryptography and Spiritualism.
The Swiss spiritualistic medium Hélène Smith (1861-1929) practised visual, auditive, typtological (spirit tapping) and glossolalic (speaking in tongues) techniques of mediumism. She authored huge cycles in which she assumed different personalities (Martian, ultra-Martian, Hindu or oriental, and royal cycles). She collected texts in Martian language, which she translated into French, in the process developing a type of automatic writing or psychography.
Same Time (series, 2015-), Seffani Jemison: font inspired by James Hampton, an African-American outsider artist, and also influenced by the creative orality of Édouard Glissant.
What Can’t Be Read, How Bethany Collins, Steffani Jemison, Adam Pendleton and Kameelah Janan Rasheed are using the tradition of black radical poetry to examine questions of subjectivity and race — https://www.frieze.com/article/what-cant-be-read
Work of the Belgian typographer Fernand Baudin, who placed great importance on handwriting and who studied the history of typography through the lens of the relationship between technological changes and the involvement of the human body in typographical composition, particularly with regard to the advent of the ball-point pen.
Amy Suo Wu, A Cookbook of Invisible Writing, 2019
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