Nuits Sonores 2024

The Nuits sonores, or “Sonic Nights”, are a yearly festival held in Lyon, France. It revolves around electronic music and neighboring genres as much as around visual and performance art. In previous posts, we have featured the typography for the editions of 2011–2013 and of 2023. Every year, the task of developing the visual identity for Nuits sonores is assigned to a different designer or studio.

For the upcoming 2024 edition, the festival curators picked Super Terrain, a collective formed in 2014 by Quentin Bodin, Luc de Fouquet and Lucas Meyer, working from Nantes and Marseille. What caught the attention of the commissioners was the way Super Terrain oscillates between graphic design and art: “We’ve seen them tuning pastels during a residency at Fotokino, making digitized bodies dance for the University Theater of Nantes (a stage for young creators), or hoisting typographic flags.”

The members of Super Terrain – who initially met at the EESAB art school they attended in Rennes – are certainly not afraid of intense colors, expressive typography, and strong statements. In their poster for Nuits Sonores they combine these ingredients: on an organic, fluorescent backdrop ranging from purple to orange and blue they place two extremely big letters, NS, for Nuits sonores. These display a metallic effect and thus mark a sharp contrast to the lava-like patterns.

The typeface they chose is very much in line with such an “industrial” take: it’s Kreuz, designed by Emmanuel Besse and released with Production Type. Kreuz is predominantly used in its Extended width. What stands out in this sans serif is the systematic way in which inner curves are smooth and round while outer curves are broken into edges, leaving a rough overall expression.

The curators are very fond of exactly this aspect, as it goes so well with a new event location they are able to use for the first time in 2024, the Grandes Locos, a former repair workshop of the French railway SNCF.