Philippe Apeloig was born in Paris in 1962 and studied at the École Supérieure des Arts Appliqués Duperré and the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD). After two transformative internships at Total Design in Amsterdam, he was hired as a graphic designer at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris in 1985.
In 1987, after receiving a scholarship from the French Foreign Ministry, Apeloig left the Orsay and moved to Los Angeles to study and work with April Greiman. In 1993, he won a fellowship at the French Academy in Rome, where he researched and designed typefaces; his font October, created at the Villa Medici, garnered the 1995 Tokyo Type Directors Club’s Gold Award. In 1997, Apeloig became a design consultant for the Louvre, then six years later, its art director, a post he held until 2008.
From 1992 to 1998, Apeloig taught typography in Paris at ENSAD. While teaching part-time at the Rhode Island School of Design in the U.S., he applied for and was appointed full-time professor of graphic design at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York. He began his new post in 1999, then was made curator of the School’s Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography in 2000. He held the dual post until 2003, when he returned to Paris to run his own studio.
Apeloig’s design compositions have won numerous prizes, including the Overall Prize at the 2009 International Society of Typographic Designers Award in London. He contributed to recent blockbuster exhibitions by designing posters for “Yves Saint Laurent” at the Petit Palais (2010). Apeloig has also created numerous visual identities and logos for nonprofits, governmental agencies, and businesses ranging from the Théâtre du Châtelet, Musée de l’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, the Direction des Musées de France, the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, to the Instituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia and the silversmith Puiforcat. In 2016 and 2017, he created the identity of the Art History Festival in Fontainebleau.
In 2013 he realized the Saut Hermès poster, a horse jumping competition in the Grand Palais in Paris. The Hermès house also entrusted him to create a scarf on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Roland Barthes in 2015, and the design of the numbers of the hermès Slim Watch. He also realized the identity of the 2017 edition of Eau d’Issey perfume, from Issey Miyake brand.
The Manufacture de Sèvres (National ceramic factory) offered him to create visuals on threes ceramic table services. This project has been exposed in the Parisian gallery of the Manufacture de Sèvres.
Apeloig collaborated with Ateliers Jean Nouvel on the way finding system for the Louvre in Abu Dhabi.
He created the logotype and identity for the Yves Saint Laurent museum in Marrakech.
In 2013, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris presented his first major retrospective. At this occasion the Museum’s and Thames & Hudson published Typorama which brings together 30 years of his graphic work. In 2015, the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam held the exhibition “Using Type” which focused on Apeloig’s typographic posters.
In 2017, the Ginza Graphic Gallery (GGG) in Tokyo presented a selection of work. GGG Books editions published a book at this occasion.
He creates typefaces which are published by the type foundry Nouvelle Noire.
Philippe Apeloig is a longstanding member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2011.