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The posters of Philippe Apeloig are all about poise. One exemplary piece shows a photograph of a Japanese Butoh dancer crouched before an upright egg the size of his head. A ghostly glow illuminates the dancer’s face as he approaches the egg, his fingers nervously splayed before him. Hovering vertically to the left is Apeloig’s delicately balanced type bearing the name of the dance troupe, Sankai Juku—“studio of mountain and sea” and the title of the work, Unetsu—“the egg stands out of curiosity.” The type seems to approach the egg with the same trepidation as the dancer, and for Apeloig, a deft typographer, the relationship between the two is not accidental. Moving type around is a great deal like choreography, he says. “When you read a text most of the time it’s very static—you don’t even look at the shape of the letters, you consider the meaning—but one of the goals of the designer is to make text appear spectacular, like a show that really catches your eyes.”


In fact, Apeloig, who was born in Paris in 1962, spent ten years of his early childhood learning to be a dancer, before arriving at the revelation that he wasn’t a natural. “I was very bad, I think, because I never had rhythm, but I loved the movement.” He discovered graphic design “by accident” he says, at the Paris École Supérieure des Arts Appliqués, where a general arts degree included a class in what the school titled “visual expression.” This led him to calligraphy and a schooling in the French-traditional approach to design (think Cartier). But it was during internships at the Dutch graphic powerhouse Total Design that he acquired a taste and understanding of the Modernist approach that became the underpinning of his work.