Robert Massin

Robert Massin is a French graphic designer, art director and typographer who is notable for his innovative experimentation with expressive forms of typographic composition. Massin stopped using his first name in the 1950s.

Massin was born in 1925 in Bourdinière-Saint-Loup, a commune in the Eure-et-Loir department in north-central France. He began working as a designer following World War II. Massin's immediate influence in the 1950s was innovative French book designer Pierre Faucheux. Faucheux emphasized the idea that each new book should be a new object determined by type choice, proportion and déroulement, the development of a visual concept over several pages. Faucheux also emphasized the idea that the choice of typeface should have some relationship to the meaning of the text. These ideas are apparent in much of Massin's most famous work.

For over twenty years Massin acted as art director of Éditions Gallimard, one of the leading French publishers of books. An early, important work for Massin at Gallimard was his 1963 design for Raymond Queneau's Exercices de style, a book of 99 retellings of the same story, each presented different graphically. Another famous design appeared in 1964 in Massin's graphic interpretation of Eugène Ionesco's play, La Cantatrice chauve (translated as The Bald Prima Donna or The Bald Soprano). The book was a major work of expressive typography, presenting the dialogue of a single play through hundreds of pages of innovative graphic compositions. Massin not only used mixtures of typefaces and new compositional methods to present dialogue, he also formally manipulated dialogue by stretching and bending.

A 2007 major monograph of his work, Massin, written by Laetitia Wolff and published by Phaidon, was the first Massin monograph to appear in English. [2]

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