Le Grand Larsen

Le Grand Larsen is an art collective uniting educators and artists around projects dealing with musical creation and cultural action. They focus on classical and contemporary music, pop songs and experimental music. The group is composed of three permanent members, and is active in the region of Lyon, France.

For their identity, graphic design studio Brest Brest Brest designed a logotype that evokes a sense of musicality as much as the propagation of sound. The Larsen effect, also known as acoustic feedback, is a disagreeable very high pitched sound that can become unbearable: the progressive expansion of the size of the letters evokes the feeling of omnipresence of this sound. Brest Brest Brest used Signal Compressed from Production Type: originally inspired by Caractères, a typeface created especially for the French road network, Signal brings up a vernacular legacy while taking into consideration the legibility needed for its use. The graphic designers took a counter-position on the typeface, and bet on the large upstrokes of the compressed versions, in order to make us experience the saturation of sound visually. Besides, it is a reminder of some wooden typefaces that were commonly used in small printing workshops well into the 1980s, often on colored paper.

Brest Brest Brest designed a poster for a “great electro choir”, organized by Le Grand Larsen in association with the Choir Oh! in Chambéry. Again we find Signal Compressed, here associated to Compagnon from Velvetyne. The typewriter-inspired typeface, set in italic, brings a roundness that we expect more from a choir, therefore anchoring the event poster in a more traditional visual imagery.