Roger Excoffon

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

Excoffon was born in Marseille, studied law at the University of Aix-en-Provence, and after, 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 (a reference to Urbi et Orbi).

Mistral typeface

Excoffon's best known faces are Mistral and Antique Olive, the latter which he designed in the period 1962–1966. Air France was one of Excoffon's largest and most prestigious clients. The airline used a customized variant of Antique Olive in its wordmark and livery until 2009, when a new logo was initiated.

Excoffon's faces, even his most sober, Antique Olive, have an organic vibrancy not found in similar sans-serif types of the period. Even the main shapes of that typeface, especially the letter O, resemble an olive. 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