We reimagined L’Équipe Magazine, the weekly supplement of France’s leading sports newspaper, in close collaboration with the editorial team. The cover was redefined through a simple gesture: isolating the letter “É” from L’Équipe as the magazine’s logo, to singularize it and give more space to the visuals. Two complementary covers coexist: a headline-driven cover for the standalone Wednesday edition, and a more minimal Saturday cover built around a single, striking visual. Our work on the new formula started with a deep exploration of the archive, dating back to the 80s. We brought back some design elements from past issues—underlined standfirsts, paragraph-starting squares, thick lines—and combined them with a timeless layout.
Gradin, the custom font we designed for the project, is a sans-serif headline typeface developed for tight compositions. It combines a compact width, minimal spacing, and square counters to produce dense and impactful headlines. Inspired by Compacta, historically used for the magazine’s identity, it offers a contemporary reinterpretation with a more monolinear construction. The family includes eight weights from Light to Black with italics, including a 22.5-degree italic based on the dynamic slant of the 1946 L’Équipe logo.
We rethought the editorial structure by creating three distinct sections, each named in resonance with the magazine: L’ÉLAN, L’ESPRIT, L’ÉPOQUE. We also proposed new recurring single-page articles, using a design-led system to create editorial rhythm and bring meaning through singular layouts. The “Glossaire” page takes a single word used across multiple sports, written in large type, and distills short answers into it. The “Generations” page compares two sports personalities side by side through a common list of milestones. The “Lieu Mythique” page looks at a legendary sports venue across decades. L’Équipe is one of the world’s most influential sports newspapers and a central institution in French sporting culture. The publication has shaped global sport, notably creating the Tour de France and the Ballon d’Or. The weekly magazine supplement was launched in 1980, and our new formula is the 13th in 45 years.
credits : photos Emmanuelle Lubaki ©Yorgo&Co