Brand design / Signage / Communications
Duration of the project: 6 months – Delivery: November 2005

Signage deals with the building lines of the city in our daily life, at the junction of personal habits and the common aspirations, where, by extension, the street setting and its urbanity shape. First there is the brand, its logotype, colors, typos and charters. Then, the building, its materials, colors, shadows and lights, place and environment, which strongly affect the creation of signage - creation sometimes forced by the authorities.

History also matters such as the 2.80 meter minimal height imposed in the city during the 19th century, replaced in the 20th century by the will to break the so called "corridor street", and nowadays filled by the reinterpretation of alignment and arrangement, such as Henri Gaudin, Antoine Grumbach and Christian de Portzampa who suggest to go back to the city, the street, the passer-by landscape, the pedestrian and the inhabitant.

And finally the user, sensitive to the commercial diversity, vitality and singularity of the street landscapes, while paying a particular attention to the light and its balance, particularly at night; and sensitive to energy savings.

There is a sensitive balance between the brand expectations and their return on investment, and the ground floor approach falling under the public interest.

And the 260,000 places in Paris, located on the ground floor with economical purpose are as many examples and studies of the possible added value of the urban environment. Groupe Eyrolles combines three fields of activity on the same site / Publishing, teaching and bookshops / in a 1930s typical building made of bricks and black metal, next to Notre Dame Cathedral, with a front of more than a hundred meters long.

Creating a signage program requires paying attention to the micro-details that help the daily usage set in the perdurable term / the thickness of fixtures, the intensity of light, the setting distance of signs to avoid drips on the walls, and requires to be integrated in a sort of creative synthesis according to the brand codes and its purpose.