Graphic Thought Facility are the most successful and prolific practice of their generation. They have developed a body of work since 1990 for clients in the cultural sector, retail and publishing that is astonishingly consistent in intellectual integrity and visual inventiveness. The work – exhibitions and environments, publications, identities, packaging and even a product of their own, the MeBox – includes many of the most memorable pieces of recent British graphic design. Their catalogue to the epoch-defining Stealing Beauty design exhibition, for example, and their marketing campaign for Shakespeare’s Globe, and the British Council’s 1996 exhibition Work From London, for which we still receive regular requests for the catalogue. Rarely do graphic designers manage to be so intensely respectful of their subject yet so adventurous in their expression, so schooled and at once so modern.

Paul Elliman is a self-taught designer who came to the attention of the design world in the 1980s as designer of the City Limits listings publication and then of the music magazine The Wire. He gained a reputation as a practitioner uniquely able to transgress the borders of visual experiment and commercial publication design. He practises little commercial design now, but researches systems of communication that operate in parallel, as it were, to those objective systems we know we use. His collections of such systems include handwriting on currency, covert letterforms in industrial components and shared verbal usage that forms accidental Internet communities. He has been assistant professor of graphic design at Yale University since 1997.

In 1905 the Mayor of Chaumont in North Eastern France donated his important collection of 19th century posters to the town. In 1990, an enlightened, later mayor got them all out of storage and held an international poster festival which has been an annual event ever since. The current and even more enlightened Mayor of Chaumont has recognised the opportunity to turn Chaumont into a festival of visual language explored through many more globally relevant media than the poster. Last year's highlight was an extraordinary, neo-Baroque installation by the Paris studio M&M in Chaumont's 17th century Jesuit chapel. This year our two British designers will share the 1930s town bus garage for an exhibition of their brilliant graphic design work. The installation evokes the language of road freight using a curtain-sided truck as a display surface and a projection room. The other two major features of this year’s Festival are an exhibition of the work of Polish Émigré designer Roman Cieslewicz and and an installation by the contemporary French multi-media designer Pierre de Sciullo.

Chaumont, France, 14 May – 27 June 2004

For further information contact Emily Campbell