Since 1994, the Cnap (Centre national des arts plastiques) is actively supporting graphic design in France, organising public projects and promoting research in the field. Each year, it publishes Graphisme en France, a journal that includes essays around a theme and the calendar of the year’s exhibitions and events. The design is entrusted to young designers who recently graduated from a French school: format, materials, binding and typefaces are left to them, which results in every issue being different from the previous one.
The theme of Graphisme en France 2022, the 28th issue, is ‘Creation, tools, research’ and follows in the footsteps of the 2012 issue, titled ‘Code, tools, design’, revisiting similar questions after ten years through three essays. Julie Blanc and Nolwenn Maudet write about the changes that happened in this period, and about their own relation to tools. Anne-Lyse Renon, who leads a project around Jacques Bertin, compiles an overview of design research in France. Joost Grotens talk about his own design and research projects which use or hijack digital tools.
Graphisme en France 2022 was designed by F451 (Quentin Creuzet, Domitille Debret and Simon Bouvier) in collaboration with Fanny Hamelin and Antoine Elsensohn. In line with this year’s theme, each section of the book was produced with a different tool: Adobe InDesign, Paged.js, LibreOffice Write, Microsoft Excel, and HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript ES6. It is entirely set in Mercure (Abyme, 2021).
Graphisme en France 2022 is distributed through the French cultural network, on request, and is also available for download.
