Roger Excoffon

Roger Excoffon (7 September 1910 – 30 May 1983) was a French typeface designer and graphic designer.

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 foundry types were produced by Roger Excoffon:^[1]

• Chambord (1945-51, Fonderie Olive)
• Banco (1951, Fonderie Olive)
• Mistral (1953, Fonderie Olive), also released by Amsterdam Type foundry in 1955.
• Choc (1955, Fonderie Olive), also released by Amsterdam Type foundry in 1964.
• Diane (1956, Fonderie Olive)
• Calypso (1958, Fonderie Olive)
• Antique Olive (1962-1966, Fonderie Olive)

• 
  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. 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

External links

• MyFonts
• Speed and Grace of Excoffon's types
• Postage stamps by Roger Excoffon