The posters of Philippe Apeloig are all about poise. One exemplary piece shows a photograph of a Japanese Butoh dancer crouched before an upright egg the size of his head. A ghostly glow illuminates the dancer’s face as he approaches the egg, his fingers nervously splayed before him. Hovering vertically to the left is Apeloig’s delicately balanced type bearing the name of the dance troupe, Sankai Juku—“studio of mountain and sea” and the title of the work, Unetsu—“the egg stands out of curiosity.” The type seems to approach the egg with the same trepidation as the dancer, and for Apeloig, a deft typographer, the relationship between the two is not accidental. Moving type around is a great deal like choreography, he says. “When you read a text most of the time it’s very static—you don’t even look at the shape of the letters, you consider the meaning—but one of the goals of the designer is to make text appear spectacular, like a show that really catches your eyes.”

In fact, Apeloig, who was born in Paris in 1962, spent ten years of his early childhood learning to be a dancer, before arriving at the revelation that he wasn’t a natural. “I was very bad, I think, because I never had rhythm, but I loved the movement.” He discovered graphic design “by accident” he says, at the Paris École Supérieure des Arts Appliqués, where a general arts degree included a class in what the school titled “visual expression.” This led him to calligraphy and a schooling in the French-traditional approach to design (think Cartier). But it was during internships at the Dutch graphic powerhouse Total Design that he acquired a taste and understanding of the Modernist approach that became the underpinning of his work.

Philippe Apeloig
Photo: Ronald Monk
 

Unetsu, Sankai Juku. National Contemporary Dance Center “l’Esquisse, ” Angers, 1993
115 x 175 cm, Silkscreen
Type: Foundry Sans
Photo: Guy Delahaye

As both dancers and designers know, flexibility is the ticket to fast learning. After two years working as a designer of posters and graphics for the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, Apeloig visited the US and befriended the digital graphics pioneer April Greiman, a designer he admired for merging irreverence and freshness with a strong typographic sense. Apeloig was inspired enough to obtain a grant from the French Foreign Ministry and left for California, where Greiman had offered him an internship in her studio. Arriving in LA in 1988, however, he was horrified by the sight of designers lined up at computers like secretaries. “The Musee d’Orsay is about the 19th century,” says Apeloig, “and arriving in LA was like jumping into the future with all these people with their keyboards and their screens.” After a few months, Apeloig came to the inevitable realization that he couldn’t return to Paris without having learned to produce work on this then-emerging Macintosh computer. He began to pick up on Greiman’s appreciation of pixellated, low resolution and moired textures, and learned the basics from her. “It was so painful at the beginning,” he says, “and I made so many mistakes, but the mistakes also opened doors.” Greiman notes how Apeloig’s dynamic compositional sense and strong type was transformed by the impact of digital tools. “I think the technology here really influenced his work a lot,” says Greiman. “He was able to experiment more easily and hybridize things. Before that he was pretty much a traditional graphic designer.”

By 1994, when Apeloig had arrived in Italy armed with a fellowship for the French Academy of Art in Rome, he was incorporating elements of the computer’s modular approach to type in his design. Inspired by the classical lettering inscribed in stone all around him, he began developing an architectonic typeface called Octobre. “My goal was to create a typeface using solid objects like wood or stone,” he explains. He used it for a poster promoting a dance and music festival in Normandy, where it appears in various sizes arranged on a grid and connected by rules in a composition reminiscent of a choreographic diagram. The rather traditionalist-minded client, expecting a photographic image rather than an all-type poster, initially balked at the idea. Apeloig won the fight and the Tokyo Type Directors Club liked it enough to give it a gold prize.

Now a full-time professor at The Cooper Union School of Art, Apeloig is attempting to bridge the gap between the technological obsessions of his students and the perennial need to develop a typographic sensibility beyond the defaults of the computer. Having come of age at a time when the computer was first embraced as a radical solution, he is now witnessing it take over. “Design is idea-oriented,” he says, “that’s what’s missing in the US, which is more technologically driven.”

As part of the antidote, he has invited a roster of internationally known designers to give one-off lectures at the school, including Wang Xu from China, Malcolm Garrett from Britain and Wolfgang Weingart from Basel, the latter a designer whose direct influence on Greiman is well documented, and whose rigor and individualism played an important part in Apeloig’s development. “It’s important that students don’t limit themselves to what they learn from their teachers,” he says.

Related Links:
Apeloig gallery at Pixelcreation.com (French)
Apeloig gallery at Poster Page

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