Look at Jazz: Studio Helmo’s experimental poster designs for Jazzdor festival have been compiled into a book

It’s quite a rare joy to see a studio build a continuous body of work for a single client over multiple decades, but that’s exactly what Studio Helmo, the french graphic design duo consisting of Thomas Couderc and Clément Vauchez, have done. For over 20 years they’ve headed up the visual identity surrounding Jazzdor, a contemporary jazz and improvised music festival held annually in Strasbourg, France, the fruits of which have now been published in a book.

When the pair first met the festival’s director, Philippe Ochem back in 2002, they had just finished their studies in graphic design, and Jazzdor had been slowly building its reputation from a small jazz club in Strasbourg in the 80s to “one of the most important improvised music festivals in Europe throughout the 90s”, Thomas tells us. From this first meeting, Studio Helmo went on to design the poster and programme for each year’s eclectic line-up of events, slowly shaping a distinct visual voice for the festival all the way up until 2019 when their brief somewhat expanded.

“In 2019, Jazzdor was awarded a Scène de musiques actuelles (SMAC) status by the French Ministry of Culture, and began to develop a programme of concerts that took place throughout the year, in addition to the festival: The Season. “For this, we designed all the concert posters every summer so that they could be screen-printed in early September,” Clément shares. The range of concerts that took place from 2019 to 2024 led the pair to a hefty pile of 56 posters, each designed to express the intricacies of each individual performance’s sound.

Out of all the work the pair have done for the festival over the last 24 years, “this is the series that we feel is the most accomplished, the most coherent and, at the same time, the most varied”, says Thomas. “It expresses something of the freedom of contemporary improvised music, breaking free from the aesthetic constraints of jazz and its fantasies.” Keen to compile this oeuvre in some form, Thomas and Clément decided to collate the series of posters into a printed book: Look at Jazz, published by Éditions B24 this September. “We felt it was important, both for us and for Jazzdor and the public who loved these posters, to bring together this collection of 56 images in a book that provides an overview of the series,” Clément shares.

A feast for the eyes, the publication looks back at the process behind the creation of this visual series. There are two interviews with Thomas and Clément, and Jazzdor director Philippe, that supplement the pair’s explosive posters designs. A true visual representation of the variety of music encapsulated in the programme, the book demonstrates how the studio has taken on a multiplicity of approaches over the years and escaped any form of repetition: their designs encompass photography, drawing, painting, typography, archival material and more, manifesting a more expansive outlook on the design of the poster as a format.

Thomas and Clément’s poster design work for The Season has been a very different task to designing a single poster for a festival each year. “For the festival, the challenge is always to summarise this profusion in a single image,” says Clèment. “The response is necessarily allegorical, attempting to be contemporary, often evoking rhythm, counterpoint, (musical) vibration, complexity and profusion. It is a difficult exercise over time, as it is not based on anything very specific.”

For their series of 56 posters for The Season’s concerts on the other hand, the designers drew more specifically on each band or musician, reducing Jazzdor’s visuals to a minimum. In each compositions the studios typeface California Bold, which Helmo exclusively designed for Jazzdor, frames each poster’s information which is “organised in three columns, sometimes at the top, in the centre or at the bottom of the poster paired with a common colour trio for each series”, Thomas shares.

This baseline structure was the thing that allowed the designers to really dive deeper into the wide variety of individual sounds platformed by Jazzdor – a light yet sufficiently distinctive design language that meant Helmo could “introduce the freest possible expressions into the poster space, without any stylistic limitations”, ends Thomas. “Just like Philippe’s freedom in programming music.”