CDA n°50
Le Club des Directeurs Artistiques, stylized as Le Club des D. A., or just CDA, is the French association of art directors. Founded in 1967, it brings together professionals active in the field of visual communication, including advertising, graphic design, and production. Central to the CDA’s mission is the preservation of the collective memory by documenting the best advertisements and design projects through its annual competition, and by publishing a book that showcases the selected works.
For the fiftieth anniversary edition, Studio Jimbo from Paris were invited to take care of the art direction, including the design of the annual as well as of the accompanying campaign. They selected PVC Banner Ultra as the display typeface. This style is part of the PVC series, a family of diverse styles conceived by Hélène Marian and available from Production Type. With its extreme width, PVC Banner can easily fill any horizontal space. Its sci-fi shapes that border on abstract graphic art function as pictorial elements themselves. On the book cover, the three letters CDA are arranged in interplay with three discs printed in silver ink. The shiny metallic surface not only adds a premium look that befits the subject of “the best”. It also is a mirror in which the readers can catch their reflection – and dream about being included in next year’s edition themselves.
On the posters and citylight displays, the discs become three-dimensional and start to interact with the outside world in different ways; as floating spheres or as whirling geometric worms. While PVC Banner is not entirely monospaced, many of its uppercase characters and numerals share the same width. Studio Jimbo made clever use of this feature, and presented the edition number and the date in a neatly stacked layout.
Inside the book, PVC Banner is used in equally large sizes for the chapter titles and, smaller, for headlines. All text including project descriptions and image captions is set in another typeface by Production Type: it’s Dr, a geometric sans serif designed by Bureau Brut.
