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By Joe Shepter
If you ever find yourself in Paris and want to see the work of Jean-Francois Porchez, take a subway. It doesn't matter where, just take one. There, on the Metro maps, you can see the crisp outlines of Porchez's Parisine typeface.
A rock star he's not. Chances are you'll catch the 35-year-old Porchez in a gray sweater, trudging to his university post from his small apartment in Malakoff, a suburb of Paris. His office, in his bedroom, is little more than a computer terminal, a printer, and a drafting table. On the wall hangs a close-up photograph of the lettering on a Roman monument.
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In type design, "you've done your best when people don't notice what you've done." - Jean-Francois Porchez
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Porchez may not seem like a revolutionary, but he's been transforming Paris with his type designs for nearly five years. His crusade began at the Dragon Rouge advertising agency, where he was employed making logotypes for mineral water and dairy product companies (finding a Paris designer who hasn't earned his spurs in the great school of water bottles and yogurt cartons is not easy).
There, Porchez read an article about the redesign of Paris's Le Monde newspaper, and it gave him pause. Not because of the redesign, which hardly came as a surprise. Le Monde was an old war horse of French culture, but thanks to its brutally undersized type and a host of other problems, it was almost unreadable. What bothered Porchez was that Le Monde planned to continue using the Times New Roman typeface, a 60-year-old newspaper standard.
On his lunch breaks, Porchez set out to change that. Never mind that he didn't know anyone at Le Monde, and that no one at the paper had ever heard of him. He had a logical, if not particularly original, plan to get Le Monde's attention: a letter to the editor.
The letter, which somehow got read, argued that Le Monde needed a new and essentially French typeface. Porchez feels that the differences in vowel and consonant frequency in different languages make for different needs in letterforms. An American, for example, who tries to find an "a" on a French keyboard will be surprised to note that it appears in the same place as the "q" on an American one. The reason is that French is awash in q's and a little short on a's. According to Porchez, the Le Monde typeface takes note of such differences and reads better in French.
His letter brought a sea change at the newspaper. "There was no question of kidding around with a new typeface for Le Monde," writes Le Monde editor Laurent Greilsamer. "It was a matter of survival. We had to catch the eyes of a large number of our readers, bringing them back from the wreck they saw." Eventually, the austere newspaper accepted Porchez's Le Monde Journal, which has since been acknowledged as a modern classic.
"People read newspapers on the subways," says Porchez. "Le Monde (the typeface) is not like Raygun or Émigré, which attract readers who come to those publications for the look and for specific content and will read them in any case. A daily newspaper has to appeal to the widest range of readers possible and make reading easier for them."
His work for Le Monde made Porchez something of a typographic star. He has since created numerous custom typefaces for clients such as Peugeot, the Paris Metro, several cruise lines, and other newspapers.
"A type designer is like the conductor of an orchestra." he says. "You're always making a variation on a theme that others have done before you. The difference is that you've done your best when people don't notice what you've done."
Adobe.com editor Joe Shepter had to reassure Porchez several times that, yes, we'll do a feature on a non-Adobe type designer.
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