REVIVING ANGE DEGHEEST
Reviving Ange Degheest is an exhibition that took place as part of the festival Une saison graphique 2020, and was imagined and conceived by the team of the typeface design workshop of EESAB—site de Rennes, composed of: Eugénie Bidaut, Oriane Charvieux, Luna Delabre, Camille Depalle, Mandy Elbé, Justine Herbel, May Jolivet (then students) and Benjamin Gomez (teacher).
The exhibition presents the work of Ange Degheest (1928-2009), a type designer whose production, now largely forgotten, bears witness to the technical upheavals in printing and telecommunications in the second half of the 20th century.
From the engraving workshop for the making of nautical charts to the typefaces for Minitel, via the Fonderie Typographique Française, the Hermes typewriters and the Mecanorma transfer letters, her creations are carried by the dynamics of the technological innovations of the times she lived in.
Type design history has retained very few women before the 1980s, even though they were very active, especially as drawing clerks in typographic drawing offices. Current research, such as the Women in Type project, is trying to bring them out of oblivion, but much of the history of these designers is lost forever, due to a lack of archives. Ange Degheest was invented in their memory, to bear witness to their forgotten stories.
The fonts are now distributed for free and in open source by Velvetyne Type Foundry and a pamphlet on Ange Degheest’s work has been published by Poem editions with an afterword by Alice Savoie.
More about the exhibition →