Maison de la Culture d’Amiens, 2022/23 season

One of the advantages of working with interesting and diverse type families is that you have a lot to choose from when you work on the same job for a couple of years. This is the case with the project featured in this post. It shows some of the promotional material for the MCA, the Maison de la Culture of Amiens in the north of France. It’s the city’s major cultural hub and a multi-partite house with an extensive program. We featured Julien Lelièvre’s redesign of the institution’s visuality as introduced in the 2018/19 season in a previous post, and have been following him over the years in order to see his ever new takes on the topic.

For the season of 2022/23, Lelièvre chose the heart as a guiding star and turned the Maison de la Culture into everyone’s home, by the French figure of speech “À la Maison”. The welcoming banners already reveal central aspects of the graphic design: clear, rectangular fields of bright colors, partly overlaid, and the typeface PVC Menu as this season’s darling. It appears in all the headlines and big reading texts. Apart from it you can see PVC Banner Ultra in MCA’s logotype and Media Sans for the smaller reading text in the program booklet. All of these typefaces were published by Production Type.

Currently, PVC is a famille nombreuse of seven, but its designer Hélène Marian is still extending it. PVC Menu is a sans serif of condensed proportions. Marian describes it as her personal take on a typical French brush lettering style which, in the 1960s, materialized in Roger Excoffon’s notorious Antique Olive. This kinship becomes evident in the vertical stroke endings, among other details. PVC Menu may be the least extreme in the family – it’s hard not to be overlooked when all your siblings are extroverts. In this season, Julien Lelièvre points us to its discrete charms, revealing that PVC Menu has a lot of personality in its own right.