The typographical choice deserves to stop for a few seconds. This is the Peignot designed by Cassandre. An emblematic character of the spirit of Paris, since it was designed for the Universal Exhibition of 1937 in Paris, and commissioned by Paul Valéry himself, for the inscriptions he wrote for the facade of the Palais de Chaillot, opposite the Eiffel Tower.
There is in this character, in our opinion, all the refinement of Paris expressed in a simple and modest way . Like a typographic oxymoron, combining the Palais du Louvre with the Place de la République. And if its institutional character is undeniable, we would have gladly embellished background remove service this choice with a more relaxed lowercase character, because as you can see the Peignot has no lowercase letters. It remains that it is certainly one of the most beautiful drawing of capital letters that exists . That’s good, since it was a question of working on the visual identity of a capital!
Let’s recognize that this typographical choice could seem to go against the unbridled use of geometric lineals found in almost all visual identities of the last 10 years. On this subject, we are not blaming anyone. But a few grams of upstrokes and downstrokes in a rough world…it was worth a try!At this stage of the project, and always within a limited time, it was a question of developing the graphic universe which could accompany this logotype. Intuitively, we played with colors and patterns. A game of rhythm, color inversions, framing… in short, classic and effective recipes.