Roger Excoffon (7 September 1910 – 30 May 1983) was a French typeface designer and graphic designer.[1]
Excoffon was born in Marseille, studied law at the University of Aix-en-Provence, and then moved to Paris to apprentice in a print shop. In 1947, he formed his own advertising agency and concurrently became design director of a small foundry in Marseille called Fonderie Olive. Later, he co-founded the prestigious Studio U+O, named in reference to "Urbi et Orbi".
Excoffon's best-known faces are Mistral and Antique Olive, the latter which he designed between 1962 and 1966. Air France, one of Excoffon's largest and most prestigious clients, used a customized variant of Antique Olive in its wordmark and livery until 2009, when a new logo was introduced.
Excoffon's faces, even the sober Antique Olive, have an organic vibrancy not found in similar sans-serif types of the period. His typefaces gave voice to an exuberant body of contemporary French and European graphic design.
Typefaces
These typefaces were designed by Roger Excoffon:[2]
- Chambord (1945-51, Fonderie Olive)
- Banco (1951, Fonderie Olive)
- Mistral (1953, Fonderie Olive), also released by Amsterdam Type foundry in 1955.
- Choc (1955, Fonderie Olive), also released by Amsterdam Type foundry in 1964.
- Diane (1956, Fonderie Olive)
- Calypso (1958, Fonderie Olive)
- Antique Olive (1962-1966, Fonderie Olive)
Antique Olive
Banco
Calypso
Choc
Diane
Mistral
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References
- Rault, David. Roger Excoffon, le gentleman de la typographie, bilingual French-English publication, Perrousseaux Editeur, Meolans Revel, 2011, ISBN 978-2-911220-39-5.
- Fiedl, Frederich, Nicholas Ott and Bernard Stein. Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Through History. Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998. ISBN 1-57912-023-7.
- Macmillan, Neil. An A–Z of Type Designers. Yale University Press: 2006. ISBN 0-300-11151-7.
- Sandra Chamaret & Julien Gineste & Sébastien Morlighem. Roger Excoffon et la fonderie Olive, bilingual French-English publication, Ypsilon Editeur, Paris, 2010, 328 p., ISBN 978-2-35654-014-0.
- ^ Savoie, Alice. "French Type Foundries in the Twentieth Century". Type Culture. Retrieved 7 September 2017.
- ^ Jaspert, W. Pincus, W. Turner Berry and A.F. Johnson. The Encyclopedia of Type Faces. Blandford Press Lts.: 1953, 1983, ISBN 0-7137-1347-X, p. 2408-249