Roger Excoffon

Roger Excoffon (7th September, 1910–1983), French typeface designer and graphic designer.

Excoffon was born in Marseilles, 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 continues to use a customized variant of Antique Olive in its wordmark and livery.

Excoffon's faces, even his most 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)

References

• 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 grave of Excoffon's types
• Postage stamps by Roger Excoffon

Persondata
Name	Excoffon, Roger
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	7th September, 1910
Place of birth	Marseilles
Date of death	1983
Place of death