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ABOUT

François Chastanet

François Chastanet (b. 1975, Bordeaux) is an architect and a graphic designer in Toulouse, France. He specializes in signage systems for transportation networks. Graduate of the École d'Architecture et de Paysage de Bordeaux, he pursued research in 2001 at the Atelier National de Recherche Typographique in Nancy, and completed a DEA in architectural&urban history at the École d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville in 2002. He currently teaches graphic design and typography at the École Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Toulouse. At ATypI 2006 in Lisbon, he spoke on Pixaçao letterforms, the shantytown graffiti letterforms found in the 1990s in Sao Paulo. In 2009, he and Alejandro Lo Celso cooperated with two students, Laure Afchain and Géraud Soulhiol, on an identity type for the city of Toulouse called Garonne. At ATypI 2009 in Mexico City, he and Catherine Dixon spoke on Cholo writing: The term cholo derives from an Aztec word xolotl meaning dog that was later turned on its head and used as a symbol of pride by the Mexican-American community in the context of the ethnic power movements of the 1960s from wich emerged the idea of La Raza or Chicano nationalism. Cholo writing originally constitues the vernacular handstyle created by the Latino gangs in Los Angeles as far back as the 1940s: it is probably the oldest form of the graffiti of names in the 20th century, with its own aesthetic, evident long before the explosion in the early 1970s in New York. Cholo writing can be seen as a cousin of the baroque gothic calligraphies typical of Mexico, as a genuine expression of a border culture between Mexico and the United States. This survey explores the genesis of these specific letterforms that paradoxically gave a visual identity to the LA infinite suburbia. For the first time ever a historical series of photographs from the early 1970s in LA is presented together with a contemporary collection, which gives a unique insight in the history of Cholo writing from an aesthetic point of view. See Placas in Los Angeles, the first suburban blackletters?, Baseline, vol. 55, 2008. In 2003-2004, he created Pontam Black: Pontam Black is a typographic project based on some letterforms observed on sewer plates destined for wordwide sidewalks, from Paris to Los Angeles, produced in Pont-a-Mousson, France. This idea was copied by Jack Usine in 2007 in his Trottoir typeface. Interview by Le Typographe.

Author of Pixaçao: Sãp Paulo Signature (2007, XGPress), and Cholo Writing: Latino Gang Graffiti in Los Angeles (2009, Dokument Press).

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The Brazilian type scene ⦿ Type personalities ⦿ Graffiti fonts ⦿ Type design in France ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Books on type design ⦿ Aztec typefaces ⦿