Design for a Wild World

The Campus des Métiers d’Art et du Design is a space fostering reflection and exchange for professionals working in the fields of art and design in Paris and the Île-de-France region. The Académie du Climat aims to be the new landmark for ecology in Paris, providing means to educate, explain, learn and better understand the climate challenge.

Together, the two institutions launched an exhibition that showcased environmentally-friendly art and design works. It featured projects by graduates of seventeen art and design schools from the Campus des Métiers d’art et du Design. The title of the exhibition references the book Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek (1923–1998), a leading advocate of eco-responsible design in the 1970s.

Jeanne Triboul worked on the visual identity including the design of the printed matter and the wayfinding, together with Coralie Milière of Studio Silex. For the title and display typeface, they chose Signal Compressed by Emmanuel Besse. With its squeezed proportions, it conveys an appropriate sense of urgency. Its reversed contrast – with horizontals that are thicker than verticals – also echoes the look of wood type as used in the American Wild West, making Signal Compressed itself a “design for a wild world”. On a practical level, its narrow proportions allowed the designers to show the title in very large letters.

The exhibition poster, which was Riso-printed at Quintal Atelier, also serves as a guide with information and floor plans on the back. The text and the labels are set in a stylistically quite different typeface that’s likewise available from Production Type: it’s Sainte Colombe, an expressive serif designed by Yoann Minet. Sainte Colombe is also used for the names of the participating schools shown as “shooting stars” on the front.

Design for a Wild World was shown at the Académie du Climat from September 8–12, 2022, during Paris Design Week.