République Studio present a captivating, typography-driven direction for Cnap’s 2021 annual report

Centre National des Arts Plastiques (Cnap) chose Parisian practice République Studio to design and produce their renowned annual report. As fierce advocates for the creative industries, the government-owned organisation grant a different studio free reign every year. Not just on the design though, this extends all the way to the paper, manufacturing and organisation of the content and data visualisation itself. “This last part is really important for Cnap,” Art Director & Designer Tom Uferas tells us, “because it explains where all the money goes and where all the investments are made. It’s the main challenge to find a way to design this data part.” Going against the grain, and contrasting with previous iterations, the team opted for a purely typographical direction for the data visualisation. “To be honest, the story is quite funny,” Uferas recalls, explaining the initial stages of the project. “When we got the first meeting with the Cnap, they showed us all the previous annual reports which were all really well designed, with beautiful and interesting data visualisations. Also, they told us to use lots of colours and gave us the advice to use many different typefaces to be able to organise the content easily because there is a lot of hierarchy in the annual report. But the fact is that we were at the beginning of the Ukrainian war, in a period of crisis, not so happy times then, and above all, the printing budget wasn’t huge so we had to be smart enough to find solutions to be able to do a well-designed book with all those constraints. So when we got out of the first meeting, despite their advice, we decided to do the exact opposite of what they were expecting.” Thanks to the vast creative flexibility and freedom granted by Cnap, the overall approach of the report is uncompromising, economical and engaging. The effect is extremely minimalist yet captivating, as each page invites a new way of interacting with the data. To achieve this low-profile look, the studio set the entire interior in Antique Legacy (Francois Rappo’s take on Helvetica, distributed by Swiss foundry Optimo) in a single weight and size. Maxitype’s Rhymes is also used for the interviews to introduce a more organic character to the content. “For this part,” Uferas notes, “we wanted to use the typography in a way that it can reflect the musicality of a discussion.”