Bureau Brut
 

Our graphic design studio tackles visual identities, editorial design and type design, for private and cultural clients or within the framework of self-initiated projects. We use our expertise to engage with various thematic and geographical environments while always being receptive to their specific contingencies. Our practice is driven by an insatiable curiosity, a total commitment to every project, and a keen understanding of strategic goals and situations. Our creative process brings together the building of typographic tools, the art direction of visual material and an exacting attitude towards implementation. Our work reveals the inner truth of a design project: the brief and its context.


Retail typefaces
 

These are original and exclusive designs that display Bureau Brut’s taste and demanding attitude. Some were originally designed as custom typefaces, others were born from personal research, but all of them are waiting for you to reach out towards new horizons. Others come from the need for an efficient, straightforward typographic tool and aim at becoming the partners you can always rely on in your day-to-day practice. Lastly, graphic design is an inherently social endeavour that provides us with many opportunities to collaborate with highly talented individuals. Why not take advantage of it? Some of typefaces are testament to these fortuitous or intentional encounters.


Publishing
 

Graphic designers have outgrown the boundaries of their traditional role : we know today of designers/authors, designers/publishers, designers/entrepreneurs, designers/curators, etc. We think that the pursuit of self-initiated projects can lead to greater opportunities to take graphic design out of its traditional setting and to enhance its ways of interacting with both culture and society. So we’ve decided to put our energy, our determination and our skills into a new series of books dedicated to the culture of graphic design and typography. We pledge to carry on this project according to the strictest ethical standards — working with local printers and binders, taking care of the physical properties and durability of the books, selecting responsible manufacturing and shipping solutions.


History
 

Julia Joffre and Yoann Minet met while studying type design together at the École Estienne in Paris. In 2015, along with Camille Prandi, they founded Bureau Brut in Montreuil. Two years later, they launched their own digital type foundry, whose catalogue of typefaces has steadily grown over the years. In recent times, they both moved to Toulouse, in the south of France, settling there for good during the summer of 2021. Now operating from the banks of the Garonne river and of the majestic Canal du Midi, they’ve just gone into their latest project, a new publishing house in partnership with Stéphane Darricau.


Julia Joffre, partner
 

When she’s not busy picking up flowers and plants in the wilderness, Julia spends her waking hours dissecting the design of books by Jost Hochuli or Robin Kinross (that is why she can’t live without her trusted typometer). Her favourite tee-shirt reads “Fake it ’til you make it”, which gives a pretty good idea of her daring and unrelenting character — and of the way she runs Bureau Brut Publishing. She thinks that graphic design is, above all else, about curiosity and the courage to ask all sorts of questions.


Yoann Minet, partner
 

Yoann is a type designer — which means that he looks at a printed text before even thinking about reading it, and that he spots the essential details (the use of a lowercase x instead of the multiply mathematical operator, for instance) that others would miss. His main professional ambition is to one day design a typeface which would have the over-the-top, popular appeal of French actor Louis de Funès’ on-screen persona. His personal life is filled with deep existential concerns, such as : “In an Italian restaurant, would Adrian Frutiger have chosen fettuccine over tagliatelle, or what?”.


Stéphane Darricau, associated partner
 

Graphic design is Stéphane’s subject of choice : he’s a teacher (he runs the DSAA Design éditorial multisupports graduate course in Montreuil, while also teaching type history at the Institut national du Patrimoine in Paris), an author (his most substantial piece of writing is the book Culture graphique : une perspective, published in France by Pyramyd) and a translator (of Ellen Lupton’s Thinking With Type, among other specialized titles). Some of his other consuming passions include Tottenham Hotspur, the novels of Jane Austen and Keith Richards’ guitar playing.


Julien Priez, co-designer of the Boogy Brut typeface
 

Julien Priez is a calligrapher and type designer, and a member of the “High On Type” collective. His work is heavily indebted to designers such as Oscar Ogg or Berthold Wolpe, who similarly envisioned calligraphy and lettering less as ends in themselves than as key steps within a vigorous, shape-shifting creative process. Though he spends an inordinate amount of time dreaming of the famous 72 steps leading up to the entrance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he also devotes long hours to the practical study of all the swash capitals that Ludovico degli Arrighi forgot to invent.