
La Rumeur
The festival of urban legends
LA RUMEUR is a fictional festival about urban legends. Held once a year in the French town of Fontenay-aux-Roses, it is aimed at a curious but not expert audience. Our festival is both educational and entertaining, with a wide range of exhibitions, lectures and workshops. As a comic strip author and graphic designer, I wanted to explore this concept in detail, mixing illustration, publishing and programming to create a visual universe that subverts the traditional codes of information.
Year
2021
Mission
Branding
Layout
Context
Personal
project
Tools
Photoshop
Illustrator
InDesign
Deliverables
Event content
I have to find a name, define all the events and programming and writing all the readable content.
A graphic universe
At the end, i created 10 promotional posters, an informative newspaper with an article and a programme,
then a random generator of urban captions.
Creative Process
01. THE NEWSPAPER CONCEPT
A large part of my visual communication will revolve around the parody of the newspaper. This medium is seen as a strong symbol of vertical transmission, representing a reliable source of information, the holder of absolute truth. So what better way than to hijack it?
02. COLOURS AND TYPOGRAPHY
The IBM Plex typographic family is the star of our festival. The diversity of its styles and weights gives us a great deal of creative freedom, while ensuring the coherence and aesthetic appeal of our event.
For the colours, I then opted for a range in shades of grey: this echoes newspaper printing, while creating an eerie atmosphere.

BLACK
GREY
WHITE

03. ILLUSTRATIONS
After a lot of research, I decided to combine textured vector illustrations with a cartoonish graphic style. The theme of our festival is urban legends, so what could be better than to combine it with the world of comics?

Deliverables
01. POSTERS
We're using these ten posters to promote the LA RUMEUR festival.
The white posters are a caricature of a racy newspaper, with hard-hitting headlines and sensational news!
They are cartoon versions of well-known urban legends and serve as general publicity for our festival.
As for the black posters, they inform us of the various events to come. These could be conferences, exhibitions or screenings of documentary films.

Promotional posters
Above: Large numbers of vipers have apparently returned to a quiet French town, terrorising its inhabitants.

Event posters
Above: This talk, presented by Yassine El Halmoui, explores the importance of science in the imagination of urban legends.

02. THE NEWSPAPER
Comprising around twenty pages, this journal contains a programme, a map and a long informative article on Internet legends. I take inspiration from traditional layouts and transform them into invasive layouts. Like those captions that penetrate your intimacy from your computer, the illustrations in our newspaper step out of the frame to impose themselves on the eye. In an open A2 format, the magazine is printed on Newspaper print 80 g/m².






03. THE RANDOM GENERATOR
Urban legends are based on the sociological phenomenon of rumour, playing on people's fears in accordance with the times and culture in which they live. To caricature, there are several stages in the telling of an urban legend.
My random generator will mix these two elements to create random and absurd urban legends. Using a mixed technology (CSS3/HTML5 and PHP), this web page offers a fun and interactive analysis of the excesses of disinformation.
Below, the random generator in action:


Result
The Rumeurs festival explores the subject of information, and the sociological processes that bring legends to life. By being aware of the mechanisms that develop these stories, we acquire a new tool for analysing our environment.
I'm passionate about these themes and creating a festival around them would be an excellent initiative, and I'd be delighted to develop the visual communication for it.