Jean Prouvé constructeur

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Space design, visual identiy guidelines, graphic and typography design for the permament exhibition about Jean Prouvé’s carreer as an engineer/designer at Musée de l’Histoire du Fer, Jarville, France.

Acting like archeologists, we explored a bunch of documents edited by Les ateliers Jean Prouvé, sketches, plans, commercial ads, etc. It helped us to extract some basic rules for our creation. We tried to respect Jean Prouvé’s philosophy, acting with sobriety, focusing on efficiency to result in a balanced and simple shape.

The only graphic element we used is a line. This basic element can indifferently be used to put the focus (underline), to structure (grid system), to guide, to isolate elements, to specify (frame) or to decorate (border). In the final project it’s either a solid continuous line or a waving line that refers to folded metal plates – which Jean Prouvé is famous for – or that refers to the exhibtion furniture we created.

For the  accurate needs of such a project, we’ve designed a couple of typographies based on existing fonts including new special characters: Nancy Blair 1 & 2 (based on ITC Blair by Jim Spiece), Nancy Brandon for titles (based on Brandon Grotesque by Hannes von Döhren) and Baby Museo, hand script for young visitors (based on Museo by exljbris foundry).

A serie of pictos is used to define objects by categories (structure, furniture, …) and guides people throughout the exhibition as a signage system. These pictos are based on emblematic objects or structure elements designed by Jean Prouvé. The one with Jean Prouvé’s famous elementary school desk helps young visitors to identify panels with special contents for them…

Scenography in collaboration with Sim&Sam team: Bruno Cohen, scenographer + Marie-Christine Dieudonné, designer + Marc Maman, producer + Jérôme Piquand, architect + Jean Marc Salieri, light designer. / Typography design in collaboration with Miguel Costa, graphic designer. / Graphic execution in collaboration with Frédéric Rey