Sir John Monash Centre

The Sir John Monash Centre at Villers-Bretonneux in northern France, designed by Cox Architecture and opened on Anzac Day 2018, commemorates the 295,000 Australians who served on the Western Front during the First World War. Working alongside Convergence Design, who developed the immersive interpretive experience within, the exhibition graphics and signage design were a defining element of the project. 

At the heart of the design was the development of a bespoke typeface, Monash, created in collaboration with typographer Dan Milne. Drawing reference from the improvised street signs Australian soldiers erected around Villers-Bretonneux during the war and the precise hand-lettering of Sir John Monash's own maps of the front, Dan Milne developed two type families, Text and Display, that gave the Centre an identity rooted in the specific history of place, classical in form, with a personality that reflected the larrikin spirit of the diggers themselves. 

The lasting legacy of the project is the typeface. The Department of Veterans' Affairs has since adopted Monash as its standard typeface across memorial sites around the world, ensuring that the letterforms born from the fields of the Somme continue to carry Australia's story of remembrance wherever it is told.