Roger Excoffon

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".

Mistral typeface

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]

  • Antique Olive
  • Banco
  • Calypso
  • Choc
  • Diane
  • Mistral

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.
  1. Savoie, Alice. "French Type Foundries in the Twentieth Century". Type Culture. Retrieved 7 September 2017.
  2. 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
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