L'équipe magazine
We reimagined L’Équipe Magazine, the weekly supplement of France’s leading sports newspaper, in close collaboration with the editorial team. The cover was redefined through a simple gesture: isolating the letter “É” from L’Équipe as the magazine’s logo, to singularize it and give more space to the visuals. Two complementary covers coexist: a headline-driven cover for the standalone Wednesday edition, and a more minimal Saturday cover built around a single, striking visual. Our work on the new formula started with a deep exploration of the archive, dating back to the 80s. We brought back some design elements from past issues—underlined standfirsts, paragraph-starting squares, thick lines—and combined them with a timeless layout. Gradin, the custom font we designed for the project, is a sans-serif headline typeface developed for tight compositions. It combines a compact width, minimal spacing, and square counters to produce dense and impactful headlines. Inspired by Compacta, historically used for the magazine’s identity, it offers a contemporary reinterpretation with a more monolinear construction. The family includes eight weights from Light to Black with italics, including a 22.5-degree italic based on the dynamic slant of the 1946 L’Équipe logo. We rethought the editorial structure by creating three distinct sections, each named in resonance with the magazine: L’ÉLAN, L’ESPRIT, L’ÉPOQUE. We also proposed new recurring single-page articles, using a design-led system to create editorial rhythm and bring meaning through singular layouts. The “Glossaire” page takes a single word used across multiple sports, written in large type, and distills short answers into it. The “Generations” page compares two sports personalities side by side through a common list of milestones. The “Lieu Mythique” page looks at a legendary sports venue across decades.
Credits
photos : Emmanuelle Lubaki ©Yorgo&Co
Type of work:
