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A poster for a jazz festival featuring a black and white portrait of a person with a beard. The image is split horizontally, with the top half shifted to create a disjointed effect. Red text reads “05–19 NOVEMBRE 2010/”.

French designers Helmo present some refreshingly experimental posters

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Date
26 November 2012

French design duo Thomas Couderc and Clément Vauchez, or Helmo to their friends, have recently finished an exhibition at the My Monkey Design Gallery, showcasing some of their finest experimental poster designs. Renowned for their colourful side-projects as much as their clean-cut identities and straight-up graphic design, it’s no surprise that the work on show had an unorthodox flavour; remixing and distorting pre-existing pieces to create strangely engaging oversize works. Hypercool! (That’s French for excellent).

A black and white poster featuring a close-up portrait of a person with a beard. Large, white, fluid organic shapes are layered over the face, partially obscuring the features. Text in the top left reads “jazzdor” and “7e festival de jazz de strasbourg”.
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Helmo: Stratigraphie

A poster for the “Jazzdor” festival featuring a fragmented black and white portrait of a person. Bold red text reads “05–19 novembre 2010/”.
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Helmo: Stratigraphie

A black and white poster for the “Jazzdor Festival de Jazz de Strasbourg”. A close-up portrait of a person is fragmented by vertical white and grey stripes. Large white text across the image reads “04–18 Novembre 2011”.
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Helmo: Stratigraphie

A red poster featuring a large, distorted black shape that resembles a ink blot. Bold, warped black lettering across the shape reads “STRATIGRAPHIE”. Smaller text on either side provides exhibition details for Helmo at My Monkey.
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Helmo: Stratigraphie

An abstract composition of intersecting white and yellow lines on a black background. The lines form a dense, geometric web of triangles and shards, with some edges appearing blurred or sprayed.
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Helmo: Stratigraphie

A poster featuring bold black typography on a white and blue background. A large, reflective silver foil sheet is torn and layered over the top, partially obscuring the words “designing” and “press”.
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Helmo: Stratigraphie

A screen-printed poster featuring a high-contrast portrait of a person in red and grey. Large, white abstract shapes and circular patterns are layered over the face and body.
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Helmo: Stratigraphie

An illustration of a large, dark, textured shape resembling a coiled snake or a figure eight. The form is filled with mottled patterns of blue, red and orange, with two small white circles for eyes. In the bottom right, text reads “ANCON” and “11 OCT 09”.
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Helmo: Stratigraphie

A photograph of a dark forest of bare trees, overlaid with a series of bold, intersecting diagonal lines in red, blue, yellow and green. The colourful lines create a geometric, web-like pattern across the natural landscape.
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Helmo: Stratigraphie

A colourful poster featuring a stylised, smiling face made of multi-coloured dots. A thick black spray-paint stroke crosses the face like a blindfold, and a black, textured shape sits at the bottom. Text at the base includes “Siana”, “Semaine des arts” and the date “mars 2009”.
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Helmo: Stratigraphie

A black and white collage of a muscular person with a large, simplified smiley face laid over their head and torso. A dark, organic shape covers their lap, resembling a distorted body or a piece of fabric.
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Helmo: Stratigraphie

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About the Author

James Cartwright

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James started out as an intern in 2011 and came back in summer of 2012 to work online and latterly as Print Editor, before leaving in May 2015.

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