It has been a delight to work with the multi-talented Isolde Nash, creative director of Le Roi Fou, the award-winning Edinburgh restaurant and bar, on the identity for Homme Libre, an exhibition of striking photographs by Carla Borel. Isolde has a background in dance, classical music and fine art and curates the exhibition programme at Le Roi Fou, an integral part of the original vision for the restaurant. I met Isolde at my studio and, while looking at books and other items that I have designed, we had a fantastic discussion about typography, design and other things. Isolde told me that the Le Roi Fou logo and identity was designed by Mike Dempsey, one of my design heroes: his 1991 identity for English National Opera, including the iconic ENO logo, is one of the benchmarks that I often return to when thinking about design.
Homme Libre is an exhibition by Carla Borel, a London-based, Paris-born photographer, who focuses on portraiture using analogue processes. For this series of portraits – with each sitter shot on a single roll of film with 24 exposures – the photographer draws on themes of identity and community, centred around the idea of masculinity seen from a female perspective.
The identity for the exhibition is typeset in Neue Kabel, the typeface that was specified as part of the original Le Roi Fou identity. Neue Kabel is a revival by Marc Schütz that brings Rudolf Koch’s classic 1927 geometric sans serif up to date. Neue Kabel offers a wide choice of OpenType variations: for example, there are options to change the lowercase letter ‘a’ from a very distinctive double storey character (with the head of the ‘a’ cut off unusually close to the stem), to a single storey one, enabling the typesetter to create interesting features – something I hope to explore more in future iterations.
For the design I wanted to strike a balance between image and typography, while still prioritising the images – Carla’s work is so powerful and her subjects so engaging, they inevitably take centre stage! I presented various iterations of the design with different images but this photograph (Jacob) was the popular choice. I took my cues from Mike Dempsey’s logo and sized the rest of the type accordingly; over several iterations, I refined the typography to create a balance on the page as well as an understandable hierarchy of information. The background colour is one of several options – all tints of colours specified in the original Le Roi Fou identity.
As I was designing this, I was thinking about how the design might work with other exhibitions – as well as trying the type ranged left and with different treatments of the title, I tested the design by dropping in images into the template from the mosaic artist, Joanna Kessel (I have had the pleasure of working with Joanna before and she is a previous exhibitor at Le Roi Fou). I hope that this will be the first of many designs for the exhibitions programme at Le Roi Fou and I look forward to seeing how the design can be adapted to suit different work.
Above is the cover of the catalogue/price list, below is the invitation:
Below is the square invitation, reconfigured for use on social media:
Below are spreads from the catalogue/price list, which is A4 folded to A5 portrait:
Carla Borel Homme Libre runs at Le Roi Fou, 1 Forth Street, Edinburgh EH1 3JX from 11 February to 30 May 2020. The exhibition is open during restaurant opening times, Tuesday to Saturday.
www.leroifou.com
www.carlaborel.co.uk