Maison de la Culture Amiens, 2021/22 season

The Maison de la Culture of Amiens (MCA) is the major hub for cultural events in this northern French city. MCA’s visual identity is being created by graphic designer Julien Lelièvre in collaboration with Bureau Jigsaw and type designer Jean-Baptiste Levée from Production Type. We previously showed the new visual identity that was introduced in 2018, and the iterations of the following years. This post is concerned with some of the items designed by Lelièvre for the 2021/22 season.

PVC Banner is an ultrawide sans that serves for the institution’s logotype. Together with PVC Promo and PVC Menu, it layed the foundation of the PVC family, a heterogeneous type series continually created by Hélène Marian. PVC Menu is her personal take on typical French brush lettering styles. Marian intended it as the family’s go-to style: it’s the least eccentric and most versatile one. We get to see Menu again for the 2021/22 season, where it’s used for headlines and banner text. The spiky PVC Dynasty – which debuted in the 2019/20 season – takes a break.

Instead, new this year is PVC Express. Developed out of Marian’s own sign-painting practice and specifically evolving from gift tag lettering, PVC Express translates the quick strokes made with a beveled marker into a digital font. Swift loopy gestures – a typical feat of the trade – are preserved in this aptly named style. Amidst the diverse styles, Express stands out as the most expressive and hand-like. At the same time, it integrates with its siblings through a shared x-height. To Marian, it was important to maintain the underlying PVC spirit: “not to mime or caricature the hand, but to show a typographic and digital response to questions raised by hand.”

PVC Express can be seen in use for the sweeping numbers on the posters and the giant banner on MCA’s façade. Inside the season booklets, it appears with its dynamic lowercase including the almost circular s, the looping i dot, and the attached accents. Other spreads feature its uppercase characters in extralarge sizes, allowing a closer look at the letterform construction and the stroke modulation.

Since September 2023, PVC Express is available for licensing from Production Type. Read more about the PVC family and its various members in a dedicated article.