Ludovic opened with the quote, “Modern man thinks in contrast” (e.r. 1952) by Emile Ruder, a fellow Swiss graphic designer. With a wonderful sense of humor, Ludovic said that he’s been called the Robert Plant of typography.

He spoke on four topics:

1. typography as corporate identity
2. typography as system
3. typography as sign
4. typography as pleasure

Highlighting the conference’s theme, Ludovic said typography is the highest contrast you can ever produce. Letters are dark; the addition of dots creates images. Type helps us keep our memory in images.

Ludovic said, “I see no colors.” He loved black and white type which offers the highest contrast one can see from far away. For the corporate identity project for Theater Basel in Switzerland, he was asked to not change the design of the logo so he decided to remove the colors and change the type setting to vertical which created a stage. Theaters normally work with images, but he used no images, but the client eventually asked for images. Insisting on not using any stage images, he decided to create his own image language.

For typography as system, Ludovic worked on the communication for the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and their art and architetural festival Warsaw under Construction. Using the city’s signage which he liked for its failures and mistakes, he redesigned it into a corporate typeface, and inspired by the architecture of Louis Kahn he incorporated the facade of Kahn’s buildings. Creating a strong contrast, the black and white pops up in a landscape of advertisements. Warsaw was known as the “city for sell.”

For typography for sign, for the Bildrausch cinema festival in Basel, Ludovic, who was known for only using black and white type, was asked to use images. They projected movie posters into the type. Again, the very visible,strong contrast allowed the design to be seen from quite a distance.

Ludovic ended with, typography as pleasure, and told us to, “stay sharp” [like a tiger]!

 

– By Diana Banh @dibanh