Roger Excoffon

Roger Excoffon (7 September 1910 – 30 May 1983) was a French typeface designer and graphic designer.^[1]

Excoffon was born in Marseille, studied law at the University of Aix-en-Provence, and then 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, named in reference to "Urbi et Orbi".

Mistral typeface

Excoffon's best-known faces are Mistral and Antique Olive, the latter which he designed between 1962 and 1966. Air France, one of Excoffon's largest and most prestigious clients, used a customized variant of Antique Olive in its wordmark and livery until 2009, when a new logo was introduced.

Excoffon's faces, even the 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.^{[citation needed]}

He is a founding member of L’Académie nationale des arts de la rue (ANAR) created in 1975 with Jacques Dauphin, Maurice Cazeneuve, Paul Delouvrier, Georges Elgozy, Abraham Moles, and André Parinaud.^[2]

Typefaces

These typefaces were designed by Roger Excoffon:^[3]

• 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)

• 
  Antique Olive
• 
  Banco
• 
  Calypso
• 
  Choc
• 
  Diane
• 
  Mistral