FRS draft: Hey Ho

Note: I am currently hustling to wrap up work on a book about the new minimalist, brutalist and modernist typographies. I have a few entries on designers left to write and since I find blogging less initimdating than Microsoft Word I will be writing these last entries on jnamdevhardisty.com. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Thanks, Namdev

All images courtesy Hey Ho

The French studio Hey Ho create some of the most stripped-down graphic design I have ever seen. The residue of the most severe Swiss typography—sans serif type, an emphasis on structure and a lack of ornamentation—lingers in their work but it is not a homage nor is it reverential. Whereas some designers practice a typographic dogmatism in which you see their influences/allegiances clearly, Hey Ho use this influence towards one end—clarity.

In a rare turn, the designers of Hey Ho, Julien Hourcade and Thomas Petitjean create exclusively (up to this point, at least) typographic works. Like the Dutch studio Experimental Jetset, they use Helvetica in almost of all of their projects but the comparison ends there. Hourcade and Petitjean avoid pun, reference or illustration. For Hey Ho, typography is the beginning and the end and they pursue it relentlessly.

Since 2005, they have been the designers for French publisher Galaade and their works have been a testament to what can be accomplished with only the barest essentials of typography—one typeface, traditional grids and black ink.  Mon Heurre Sur La Terre by Claude Vigée is a study in extremes. Underneath the dust-jacket, the front and back covers are adorned with a huge “V” and “C” respecitively and the chapter headings are set in all-caps type so large that it takes eight pages to display the first essay title. This kind of brutalism is a constant in their body of work but its not the full extent of their interests. They use a twelve-column grid on Mon Heurre and, in general, they design a fairly traditional book, except that there are constant deviations from the over-all style. Some sections maintain the same type style but use the grid differently; in another instance, a piece of writing is set in bold-face and takes up the full-width of the pages; and then there is the table of contents. Its the most complex visualization of their grid and uses multiple weights and sizes but is also an extremely clear and nuanced piece of information design. Oddly, its also situated on page 912, as if the whole book is growing more complex and subtle from beginning to end.

Mon Heurre like much of their work for Galaade, uses extremely thin papers allowing the other side to show-through. In perhaps another comparison to Experiment Jetset, Hey Ho seem acutely aware of printed matter as an object and they work to heighten that experience. Whether it be using paper to reveal the grid and structure of a piece or flooding the backsides of posters with a single color.

The cultural journal Particules displays much of the tendencies present in their other work but, where the Galaade projects use white space to shape the pages and allow for visual ease, Particules is a text-heavy newspaper with set in condensed black type. In the rare instance that a column isn’t totally filled with text, the show-through of the newsprint makes sure its not empty. Given the visual heaviness of the pages, the over-all high-contrast typography still maintains the clarity that marks their design.

The work of Hey Ho is a rare thing—few designers work exclusively in typography and fewer still embark on such an elemental path where influences aren’t readily seen. But the outcome is a singular body of work whose purity of vision may actually prove to be timeless.

Tagged as: Design, frs, hey ho, typography