Wildlife: a new character enters the typographic directory
Tuesday 30 January at 6 pm, graphic design professionals are welcomed at the Ministry of Culture for the presentation of Fauna, typographic character created by Alice Savoie as part of a commission from the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap), in partnership with the Groupe Imprimerie Nationale.
As part of its acquisition and creative support policy in the field of graphic design, the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap), a public institution of the Ministry of Culture, has launched, in partnership with the Groupe Imprimerie Nationale, a new command for creating a typographical character. Following a call for applications, Alice Savoie, a young designer, was selected by a jury of experts to create a new typographic character.
The Fauna proposes an astonishing, contemporary and prospective approach to typographic creation, based on the plurality of the animal world and the diversity of its morphologies. To create the Fauna, Alice Savoie relied on two reference works, both printed and preserved by the National Printing Bureau: the Natural History of Buffon and the Description of Egypt, commanded by Emperor Napoleon I. Three classes of animals, reptiles, birds and mammals, laid the foundations of a heterogeneous typographic grammar whose fats, curves and volumes provoke and stimulate the imagination.
Echoing the character Fauna, illustrator Marine Rivoal has imagined an imaginary bestiary, a hybrid family at the crossroads of different species.
Alice Savoie is a character designer, teacher and researcher in the history of typography. She is a graduate of the École supérieure des arts appliqués Duperré, the École Estienne and the University of Reading (United Kingdom), where she obtained a PhD in the history of typography in 2014. She teaches and supervises research projects at the Atelier National de Recherche Typographique de Nancy (ANRT), the Post Diplôme «Typographie & Langage» at the École supérieure d'arts et de design d'Amiens (ésad) and the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon (Ensba Lyon).
The character Fauna, the subject of the commission, but also all the studies, sketches and development and production documents have joined the collection of the National Centre of Plastic Arts. The graphic design collection has been regularly expanded since 2010 and includes several typographical character sets and Fauna Alice Savoie joins theInfinite Sandrine Nugue, the Coline of Émilie Rigaud, the Panorama of Jean-Baptiste Levée, the Camille of Malou Verlomme, the Lowercase Huot-Marchand, the Mallard by Natalia Chuvatin, Jonathan Perez, Kristyan Sarkis and Irene Vlachou Bely of Roxane Gataud.
The Fauna can be downloaded freely and free of charge from the website: http://cnap.graphismeenfrance.fr/faune