Production Type

Vanity Fair France

In 2013, Vanity Fair commissioned a typeface that would make its French edition more specific to its French readership. The design needed to be conceived of as a playful tool—eye-candy for the reader, reminiscent of a golden age of graphic and advertising culture. Recalling the classic elegance of the twenties and thirties, the shapes of the resulting face, Vanité, bring French flair to the magazine. Vanity Fair France is not just another national edition; it has its own distinctive voice. The typeface is like the magazine: shiny on the outside, biting on the inside.

Dubbed Vanité Nouveau, the new family exponentially deploys the potential of the original three-weight Vanité. Initially designed as uppercase-only, the capitals alone needed to convey as much personality as possible. Adding lowercase characters meant one of two things: either a glut of expressivity or a balanced tension composed of quieter designs. Production Type chose the latter path to ensure flexibility of use and to maintain the original concept of the typeface: a design playful enough to avoid the boredom of repetition, but restrained enough to enable renewed versatility.

The lowercase characters extend the original 1920s French Riviera mood required of Vanité, yet their relative formality bathes the family in a more serious, pensive voice.