Festival POST
Le Grand-Quevilly is a French municipality of 26,000 inhabitants in direct vicinity to Rouen, capital of Normandy. Sitting on the river Seine, the lively city disposes of bustling commerce and popular green recreational areas. Largely urbanized between 1950 and 1980, with its population tripling, Le Grand-Quevilly is today one of France’s cities with the highest quota of social housing – 67 percent.
In autumn 2021 the city first organized the POST festival in collaboration with the artists’ collective HSH Crew, founded in Rouen in the middle of the 1990s and since extending their artistic interventions to other cities across France and Europe. The POST festival is dedicated to urban art and culture and, for the second edition in spring 2022, extended its scope from hands-on graffiti workshops to hip-hop dance gatherings. The event draws its name from the venue, a former sorting station of the postal services.
The posters and other advertising materials shown here were conceived by graphic designer and photographer Julien Lelièvre who also happens to be a member of HSH Crew. The key elements of the visuals are a bold yellow color, Media Sans as typeface family, and images. For the first series the designer separated headline typography from the imagery that features graphic interventions in public spaces by Lksir, another HSH Crew member. In the second series, he filled the letterforms themselves with photography.
This works especially well with the Extra Condensed Black style of Media Sans that serves for the POST logotype. In total, Media Sans comes in five widths and five weights, plus italics. A variety of these cuts can be seen here in combined use. While they differ significantly in tonality, they all share an amazingly high x-height that results in a pronounced band effect in the lowercase characters.
