Assigned the creation of a printed version of the digital news platform AOC [Analyse, Opinion, Critique], our team responded to the demand with the project “Hypothèse”. I with the project manager was in charge of the art direction.
AOC offers readers three news articles a day on week days—an analysis, an opinion and a critic—plus an interview on Saturdays and a fiction on Sundays. Hypothèse is a monthly publication that includes a selection of the articles published on the website of AOC each month. The five categories are kept; every issue includes three analysis, three opinions and three critics, selected based on the most discussed topics of the month in each category, plus an interview and a fiction which are the team’s favourites of the month.
The printed version aims to appeal to a younger audience like ourselves as well as the subscribers of the digital platform. Loyal to the spirit of AOC, Hypothèse seeks to provide readers with ideas rather than convincing them; it opens up minds and invite the audience to think, like hypotheses in scientific fields.
In the art direction, we were largely inspired by Swiss graphic design and gave our work a scientific touch with the use of lines, shapes and diagrams.
The logo was created based on the typeface Neue Machina Ultrabold designed by Mathieu Desjardin in 2019 in collaboration with Vasjen Katro; the glyphs were modified to become more linear and simple.
The layout design is based on a grid of 7 colomns that allows the page to be devided into two blocks of contents of different width, therefore adding dynamisme to the long text.
The font families used are Jannon 10 Pro, designed by Jean Jannon from 1610 to 1621 and digitalised by Storm Type Foundry in 2014, and Akkurat Pro, designed by Laurenz Brunner and published on Lineto in 2004. As Jannon being classic, elegant and also dynamic, well adapted for long texts, Akkurat is rigorous in a mathmatic way, neutral, minimalist and has a high readability.
The colours that AOC uses for each category are kept to maintain a connection between the digital and the print, so that readers can recognise them immediately.
The photos used in Hypothèse share a natural, humanistic and colourful aesthetic and bring the audience near the subject with a relatively close proximity.
We also suggested a remake of the website of AOC with “Hypothèse” as a tab. The new design echoes with the identity of the printed newspaper. It is simpler, the large surfaces of colour removed, and lines, photos and diagrams are added as in Hypothèse.
