Our story
How the blonde cows of the Aubrac gave their name to a poster workshop in Estaing.
The morning the name arrived
There are two of us: Fred and Cornélia. Married, two children, a workshop in Estaing. We make the posters together. Everything we make, we hung at home first.
One morning, high on the Aubrac, we were talking to a cattle farmer. He told us about his animals, about the cold that holds until May, about the climb to the summer pastures. And then he named his bull: Marcel.
Cornélia looked at the herd around him. Fawn coats, from pale blonde to deep tawny, eyes ringed with black as though made up. She said, without thinking:
With all those blondes around him, he can’t be bored!
We laughed. We walked on. A few days later the name was there and it never left: Marcel et les Blondes. That is the name the workshop opened under, and engraved its first bracelets under.
Since then, the bracelets and the posters have each gone their own way. The engraved bracelets stayed with Marcel, in a shop of their own. The posters stayed with the blondes: Poster de Blonde. Same workshop, same hands, same morning on the Aubrac.
There is no more complicated story than that. One line said laughing in front of some cows, one morning, eight hundred metres from the workshop where everything is printed today.
Why the blondes
Aubrac cows are not blonde by accident. Their fawn coat runs from pale blonde to deep tawny, with the muzzle and the eyes ringed in black — the look people call made-up, and which you do not forget once you have met it.
It is a hardy breed, selected over centuries on windswept, snowbound plateaux. It climbs to the summer pastures from May to November, between one thousand and fifteen hundred metres, and comes back down when the cold returns. It calves alone. It lives long. It holds.
Which is more or less everything you ask of something you look at every day.
Estaing, in the Lot valley
The workshop is in Estaing, one of the Plus Beaux Villages de France. A hundred metres away, the early sixteenth-century gothic bridge crosses the river; it is on the UNESCO World Heritage list as part of the routes of Santiago de Compostela.
The GR 65 — the Via Podiensis, the Le Puy-en-Velay way — passes under the windows. Every day, people walk through the village with a pack on their back and two hundred kilometres behind them, heading for Conques, then the Pyrenees, then Galicia.
That may be why we draw places, dates and routes rather than logos.
- Le Puy-en-Velay
- The Aubrac
- Estaing
- Conques
- Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port
- Santiago
From Le Puy-en-Velay to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port: 752 km. As far as Santiago: 1,520 km. Those are the two figures we measure on the track ourselves, for the route poster.
What used to fit in fifteen millimetres
The workshop began with engraving: a wooden face fifteen millimetres by ten, the size of a thumbnail, that had to hold a child’s first name, a wedding date or the coordinates of a place where somebody said yes — legible in twenty years, on an object that could not be taken back.
Those aren’t examples picked at random: they are our own landmarks. A wedding date, two children’s names — we have both, and it was in trying to fit them onto fifteen millimetres that we learned to measure.
The bracelets now have a shop of their own. The habit stayed: nothing is judged by eye, and that is how we make the posters.
The other end of the workshop: seventy by one hundred
A poster is seven hundred millimetres by a thousand. It is the craft of the early days turned inside out: on fifteen millimetres you removed everything that didn’t fit; on a poster you resist everything you could add.
Why a map rather than a photograph. A photograph of the street where you met is somebody else’s photograph; the map is the place itself. Our backgrounds carry no labels at all — no street name, no town name. The title, the date and the coordinates are written by you, over the top.
Why a computed sky rather than a drawn one. A decorative sky is pretty and means nothing. This one puts 5,044 stars, down to magnitude 6, where they actually stood that night — precession and the country’s own time zone included. Two hours out and the sky has turned thirty degrees. The moon likewise is a NASA photograph, not a disc with round seas: we tried drawing one, and it was unsellable.
At three hundred dots per inch, a seventy by one hundred comes to 8,268 pixels by 11,811. That is where the discipline of the fifteen millimetres is paid for: at that size, anything approximate shows.
Nothing sits in stock with somebody’s name on it
Every poster goes to print once the order is placed. That is a constraint before it is an argument: we cannot get it wrong, and we cannot take it back. A poster with somebody’s name on it sells to nobody else.
Which is why the preview you compose is exactly what gets printed — the print file is made from that very page — and why, before anything goes into the basket, a screen asks you to read your poster through at full size.
What we commit to
- Printed and packed here
- We design, print and pack everything ourselves, the two of us, in the Estaing workshop: nothing is outsourced. To order, with particular care over the packaging, then checked before it ships. Flat for A4, rolled in a long box for larger sizes.
- No ad trackers, no cookie banner
- This site sets no advertising cookie and has no banner to accept. The only audience measurement is cookieless and without identifiers, hosted in the EU; fonts and maps are served by us; the share buttons load nothing until you click.
- No invented reviews
- The reviews shown were left by customers from their own order page, read before publication to set aside what is not a review, never to sort the ratings, and signed with an initial. The average is calculated from them, never written by hand.
- The maps are credited
- The poster base maps come from OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL licence. The attribution appears on every printed poster.
- Paper made to last
- 250 g matte paper and pigment inks: a poster made to stay on the wall, not just for a season.
What we will not do
- No posters printed in advance with a common first name, waiting for a buyer.
- No countdowns and no fake stock running out.
- No selling your address, and nothing sent that you did not ask for.
Since
- 2024The morning on the Aubrac, and the name.
- 2024The workshop opens in Estaing, on fifteen millimetres of wood.
- 2025The personalised posters: the map of a place, the sky of one night, the moon of a date, the line of a route.
- 2026The posters take a name of their own, Poster de Blonde. The bracelets keep Marcel.
- TodayPosters printed to order, for a birth, a wedding, a retirement or a dog on the run. Still the same workshop, the same hands.
A second site: My Custom Star Map
The same workshop runs a second site, My Custom Star Map, which does one thing only: the star map. You choose a place, a date and a time, the sky of that moment is drawn, and the poster is printed and shipped from Estaing, or delivered as a file to print yourself. Same company, same workshop.
And Marcel?
He is still up there, somewhere between one thousand and fifteen hundred metres, surrounded by his blondes. He does not know that the bracelets carry his name, nor that the posters carry his blondes’, and that is exactly as it should be.