My research on the typeface Mistral, its designer Roger Excoffon, and Mistral’s multiple appearances throughout the city of Montreal, continues. And the gallery of examples is steadily growing. I’m just about ready to have a crack at actually writing about it. That said, any and all fresh information on Excoffon or Mistral gratefully received…

Last weekend I happened upon a flyer for our local agricultural fair. Depending on your point of view, the design is either utilitarian, ‘vernacular,’ or plain awful. What’s most intriguing about it to me is that, adrift in this soup of absent-minded bullets, boxes and blobs, are two stand-out ‘professional’ design elements. One is the Conklin Shows ‘Happy Clown’ logo, designed by the late Chris Yaneff, and the other is a rather conspicuous line of jazzy type worthy of Roger Excoffon. The signature inlines suggest that it could be French Caps or Paris Flash, except that the angle of stress of the letter ‘o’ is angled rather than vertical.

In fact, an article from World’s Press News and Advertisers’ Review (Feb. 1955), titled ‘New French Types’ (also featuring Excoffon’s Banco and Mistral), suggests that the original typeface (with requisite angled ‘o’) was called Flash: “a most admirable letter…the surface treatment is one of those inspired notions that ‘comes off’ remarkably well. The urgency of the name conveys itself to the letter form and suggests its use at once for any last-minute announcement.”