Experimental Jetset – Amsterdam.

Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié
Artist posters

We started by just putting the artist’s name on a piece of paper. ‘Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié’, written large, like a classic solo exhibition poster. Staring at the sketch, the French name Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié became more and more foreign to us, until we just saw a swirl of letters. That’s when we figured we should do something with the concept of anagrams. We rearranged the letters of the name Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié, until we arrived at two different combinations of words that we liked. These two combinations acted almost like little stories: “Jetset, Airbomb, Euroline” and “Motel, Beer, Boat, Injuries”.

We added some red dots to the posters, to turn the O’s into targets, emphasizing the ‘bomb’ part. As we wrote later to Jérôme, it was interesting that a lot of the words that were generated by his name were in fact quite disturbing: bomb, airline, route, ruin, jumbo, jet, robot, meteorite, tomb, babel, etc. The whole anagram concept had unleashed an swarm of unexpected Nostradamus-like predictions. That’s why the posters almost resemble newspaper headings, or even warning signs.

Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié
Artist poster installation

Second Amsterdam Film Night (2AFN)
Logotype poster

In 2003, we designed quite an extensive (and expensive) package of printed matter for the First Amsterdam Film Night (1AFN), including six different A2 posters (see 1AFN) . A year later, we were asked to design all the material for the same event, now named Second Amsterdam Film Night (2AFN). The only difference was that there was considerably less budget than the year before, and considerably less time. In other words, the material we designed for 2AFN was in many ways a slimmed-down, streamlined version of the stuff we did for 1AFN.

We based all the items we designed for 2AFN on the logo we designed for 1AFN a year earlier. This logo showed the acronym ’1AFN’ in combination with four abstract black bars, referring to strips of film. For 2AFN, we took these abstracted strips of film and turned them into a large numeral 2. Or actually, we turned them into two different variations of the numeral 2.

Neutral
Film poster ⁄ type specimen

In June 2005, Kai Bernau, a student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KABK) in The Hague, asked us (among some other designers) to participate in Neutral, a graduation project that was both a neutral typeface, and a statement about neutrality. Apart from contributing to an e-mail discussion on the subject of neutrality, he also asked the invited designers to create a poster displaying the Neutral typeface. These posters were shown during Kai’s graduating exhibition. More about this project can be seen at Letterlabor.

Thinking about the idea of introducing a new sans serif typeface, we suddenly remembered a quote about Stanley Kubrick, a quote that has been posted on a lot of (typo)graphic forums. It’s a quote pulled from an article in The Guardian, describing Kubrick’s obsession with the typeface Futura: “It was Stanley’s favourite typeface. It’s sans serif. He liked Helvetica and Univers too. Clean and elegant”. We used this quote as a starting point for our poster. Since Kubrick was clearly so interested in sans serif type, we figured that the best context to show a new typeface would be a poster for one of Kubrick’s movies; the ultimate testing environment for a sans serif. Also, a movie poster is a very recognisable format, so we thought it would fit quite naturally in Kai’s series of posters. While we were thinking about this plan (to design a completely typographic poster, as a sort of hybrid between a film poster and a type specimen), we suddenly had another idea. We realised that the most ‘neutral’ letter of a sans serif alphabet would be the ‘I’, as it is just a black vertical bar: it could be either a capital ‘i’ or an undercast ‘L’. In fact, it is the context (the word in which the letter is placed) that decides whether the ‘I’ is an ‘i’ or an ‘L’. At that point, we made the connection between this neutral ‘I’, and the black monolith that plays a central role in Kubrick’s ’2001: A Space Odyssey’.

>> Brilliant conceptual design courtesy of Experimental Jetset in Amsterdam.

(via Todd Roeth)
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