Bon Anniversaire, Jean-Luc!
Our favourite director turns
EIGHTY, and we want to celebrate
(with) him, with everyone.
We were always in love with the title sequence lettering to Godard's movies Made in U.S.A. and 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle. So as an hommage to Jean-Luc, to the Nouvelle Vague, to Seberg, Karina, Faithfull & Cie., we present you our Jean-Luc typeface, as a birthday gift for everyone. Voilà!
We didn’t find out who originally made the lettering for these two movies. Some speculate it could have been Godard himself – Godard’s interest in graphic design and typography is clear, with many of his other films employing such strong typography-only titles and intertitles. They are almost a self-sufficient entity, another character in the movie, another comment.
This style of lettering is so interesting to us because it is such a clear renunciation of the “pretty”, classical title screens that were common in that time’s more conservative films. It has a more vernacular and brutishly low-brow character; this lettering comes from the street:
We can not prove this at all, but we think it may be derived from the stencil letters of the Plaque Découpée Universelle, a lettering device invented in the 1870s by a certain Joseph A. David, and first seen in France at the 1878 Exposition Universelle, where it found broad appeal and rapid adoption. We think this style of lettering was absorbed into the public domain vernacular of French lettering, and that the 2 ou 3 choses titles are derived from these quotidien lettering style, as it would seem to fit Godard’s obsession with vernacular typography.
We learned about the PDU through Eric Kindel’s article in Typography Papers 7. In 2009, then-Werkplaats Typografie student Dries Wiewauters surprised us with a revival of the Plaque Découpée Universelle.
Below, the JeanLuc alphabet (white) and the PDU alphabet (blue), to show similarities and differences.
You can get the typeface right here, in two styles, for Desktop and Web use:
The typeface has been sent to your email address.
You will receive the fonts in the mail (.otf, .woff, .eot and .svg). We hate spam as much as the next person and would never send you any. We don't have a mailing list, so we will only use your email address to send you a notification in case we update these typefaces. Surprised with the amount of downloads, we have to retract this statement. We simply have no idea how to process that many addresses.
Please note that the typeface will be emailed automatically to the address you enter, so may we suggest a real email address? Also, most throwaway email addresses, such as the ones from mailinator, don’t work: They don’t allow large enough attachments for us to deliver the mail.
Typeface design, website design and art direction: Atelier Carvalho Bernau. Design intern: Bernd Volmer. Web programming: Dan Powers. Technical consultant: Type Supply.
Further reading: Godard’s Intertitles by Andrea Hyde, on the Walker design blog; The ‘Plaque Découpée Universelle’: a geometric sanserif in 1870s Paris by Eric Kindel, in Typography Papers 7; Dries Wiewauter’s revival of the Plaque Découpée Universelle and his versions of the lettering they produce; the book Roger Excoffon et la fonderie Olive by S. Chamaret, J. Gineste, S. Morlighem; this video of Laura Forde’s presentation of her thesis Objects to be Read, Words to be Seen: Design and Visual Language in the Films of Jean-Luc Godard 1959–1967; and of course, Godard’s Made in U.S.A and 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle and their respective title sequences on YouTube: 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle, Made in U.S.A.
Laura Forde, "Jean-Luc Godard's Critical Appropriation of Graphic Design in the 1960s" (2010 D-Crit Conference) from D-Crit on Vimeo.
The films of Jean-Luc Godard have been written about perhaps more than any other cinematic works, often through the lens of cultural theory, but not nearly enough attention has been paid to the role of designed objects in his films. Collages of art, literature, language, objects, and words, Godard's films have an instant, impactful, graphic quality, but are far from simple pop artifacts. The thesis this presentation derives from, "Objects to be Read, Words to be Seen: Design and Visual Language in the Films of Jean-Luc Godard 1959-1967," explores and interprets the role of visual language within the films-title sequences, intertitles, handwritten utterances, and printed matter in the form of newspapers, magazines, and posters. By examining le graphisme within the cultural context of Paris during the 1960s, this thesis seeks to amplify the significance of graphic design in Godard's first fifteen films, beginning with 1960's À Bout de Souffle (Breathless) and ending with 1967's Weekend. While Godard was not a practicing graphic designer in the traditional sense, he was an amateur de design, an autodidact whose obsession with designed objects, graphic language and print media resulted in the most iconic body of work in 1960s France. --- The School of Visual Arts MFA Design Criticism Department presented "Crossing the Line: The 2010 D-Crit Conference" organized by graduating D-Crit students at the SVA Theatre in New York City on Friday, April 30 2010.