The starting point for this research project is the historiographical and aesthetic crossroads of four archival resources, to show the processes and intellectual trajectories that only graphic archives can enable us to understand.

This research work proposes to retrace an investigation that is both historical and graphic, between the unpublished archival holdings of researchers and graphic designers of the second half of the 20th century, through the human and social sciences, from cartography to typography, from France to India.

The study begins in the 1960s with the research and theories of Jacques Bertin, a French cartographer and semiologist, and leads us in India to the work of Anne Chappuis and Luc de Golbéry, cartographers and statistical geographers, who computerized Bertin’s concepts for the Bureau of Economics and the Department of Planning and Development of the state of Andhra Pradesh and then Telangana.

In India at the same time and on the other side of the country, the National Institute of Design (NID)

of Ahmedabad, then very new, invites numerous artists, architects, designers and typographers for educational stays. Mahendra Patel trained in type design with Dorothea and Armin Hofmann, met Bruno Pfäffli and Adrian Frutiger, and then went to Basel for further training, notably with André Gürtler. Some of his first professional experience was at Atelier Frutiger in Paris, and then he co-designed the Dev-nagari, New-Nagari and Tamil Linear typefaces with Adrian Frutiger. Back to India, and after teaching at the NID for over 30 years, he was awarded the Gutenberg Prize in 2010. His archives will be studied for the very first time.

This inquiry presents previously unpublished archives of Adrian Frutiger’s manuscripts, including some of his documentation and successive drafts of essays on the relationship between language, signs and human history. Writing at the same time as Bertin, gravitating in common intellectual and professional circles, and even quoting him, the aim is to retrace their theoretical trajectories.

Finally, by bringing together these works, we aim to explore a black box of research in the humanities and social sciences, precisely that of its visuality and graphic expression.

 This project is based on the research project “Graphic Design and Research in Social Sciences. The Jacques Bertin Graphics Laboratory” (DESIGNSHS), funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) for a four-year program (2021-2025).