Bonjour Médoc guide

Bonjour Médoc is an illustrated travel notebook-guide realized for the Parc naturel regional Médoc (PNR) and co-edited with deux degrés editions. This illustrated notebook is inspired by our peregrinations and encounters with local people. I worked with Gabriel Bord, who worked on the editorial creation and is co-author of the texts with Ulrich Legait.

Julianne Huon, the illustrator, also accompanied us all along the project to bring life to the book and retranscribe our immersion in the Médoc. In the form of short stories, anecdotes and illustrations, jump into the adventure of Bonjour Médoc!

For the artistic direction and design, I drew my inspiration from the visuals used for the first paid holidays in France (since 1936), as well as summer and seaside posters such as in thw ork of Henry Le Monnier (France, 1799–1877), geometric letterforms of Art déco, or even the first posters of Soulac-sur-Mer. With a colourful and lively universe, we wanted to represent the warmness and summery joy in all the book to inspire people to go all over Medoc! Several graphical facets inspired by the diversity of the territory are mixed and come in all sorts of coloured graphical atmospheres.

The work regarding typography regroups four different parts that reflect an interest and a graphical meaning:

1) Represent the seaside and summer aspect by using a bold font which reminds tourist posters of 1930s and ’40s in Europe: Mostra Nuova (2009) by Mark Simonson (USA, 1955).

2) I set the standard text with the Adobe Caslon (1990), by the great Carol Twombly (USA, 1959), after the typefaces by William Caslon (England, 1692–1766), which has a legendary clarity and belongs to a great literature tradition. This font allowed me to talk about the territory and anecdotes.

3) Represent all useful and complementary informations with the help of Interstate (1993–99) by Tobias Frere-Jones and Cyrus Highsmith. This design is notably well known for being derived from road signs.

4) And finally there’s digitized handwriting, drawn by Julianne Huon to create a bond between graphism and drawings, shouting at the reader with a warm and dynamic touch! Bingo!

See more images on Behance.