A French “mamie” is an English “granny” and this little translation is already the key to understanding the project featured in this post. La Mamie’s is a French DJ collective founded in 2007 and engaged in electronic dance music. They also run their own record label called Mamie’s Records of which you can get a good idea on their Bandcamp page.
In 2020 they commissioned Paris-based studio Aletheia, consisting of Anthony Vernerey and Hugo Dumont, to redesign the record label’s logo. It combines the drawing of a grandma with a wordmark, but what is more important, the designers found a clever way to tell the story even further through materiality: combining 2D and 3D techniques, they achieve the impression of the logotype being knitted. In a feature on It’s Nice That, Anthony Vernerey explains:
“We would have loved to collaborate with real grandmas so that they could knit us some images, but the temporality of the project did not allow us to do so. The digital solution allowed us to have a lot more flexibility and to be able to animate the images in a somewhat surreal way.”
The fonts used here are Signal Compressed for “Mamie’s” and Alte Haas Grotesk for “Records”. The Signal family started in 2018 with Signal Compressed, Emmanuel Besse’s digital interpretation of the lettering painted on French streets to inform drivers. This outtake was subsequently followed by Signal, a geometric sans family based on French road signage but extended into a typeface family fully functional for longer reading texts.