Graphéine

What is the story of the studio ? MR: I did a post-diploma program after studying visual communication at the Duperré School of Applied Arts. During this transition year between my studies and the working life, I found a six-month internship at Euro-RSCG in Paris. This short period taught me a lot about the reality of the professional world. Later, I worked eight months for a start-up specialized in the field of performing arts. Then unfortunately the business collapsed… but I had the chance to keep in touch with one of our clients at that time, for whom I made a festival poster. This is how I decided to become a freelance designer in 2001. The following year, I started to collaborate with a friend… and finally between 2002 and 2005, we have gone from two to five. We defined a name, a brand identity, then Graphéine continued to evolve until the formation of the corporation. Between 2010 and 2011, I was divided between my personal life in Lyon and my professional one in Paris. After many round trips, I finally decided to settle in Lyon, that is why the agency is now existing in two French cities. Today, we are an agency of eight people : Adrienn, Céline, Gaspard, Jérémie, Jonas, Mathias, Philip and Sophie. Both teams are organised around a creative director — Jérémie Fesson in Paris and I in Lyon — but also a studio project manager, one or several art directors and graphic designers. Despite the geographic distance between both offices, we have developed some tools allowing to share creative thoughts. PS : Thanks Dropbox, Trello and co.

Do you have a particular work ethics ? Our ethics prohibited us from working for Areva, for example. Thus, in the past, we refused a major contract for the Ministry of National Identity. These are extreme examples. We might usually collaborate with associations as well as institutions, SMEs, multinationals… in both the public and private sectors, and this as long as we can incorporate environmental, social and economic issues in our work. In this context, our major preoccupation is to build a relationship of mutual trust with our clients. We are not subordinates and we always assume to make proposals to our customers. It is when there is a mutual listening that the project can become truly interesting. We are not doing each time original or atypical proposals, this is not our goal. We first answer to a request. But we always try to elevate the client in terms of dynamic and concept, and if he manages to change thanks to our project, we are satisfied. The reverse is also true.

Can you tell us about projects that are particularly important to you ? The corporate identity that we did for the Saint-Étienne Opera House is a very important project for us. We worked on it during four months with a team of four people, it was pretty intense. It required a lot of energy, a lot of contact with external contractors : photographers, printers… We are always extremely proud when the client is satisfied and when we delivered a project that suits us just as well. But we are not only happy with our large-scale projects. For example, I am thinking of the corporate communication we did for the conference of humanitarian professionals (Salon des Métiers de l'Humanitaire). We proposed a little more complex concept that the one they were used to handle… but they perfectly cooperated. It was a rewarding collaboration. We worked on several participatory principles, and everything leads us to a project that we really love, despite its modest budget.

What is the role of your blog ? Firstly, it is a strategic and commercial investment. We demonstrate our expertise showing that we are able to talk about our graphic designer job. This is also a sharing tool : we want to stay open by presenting our projects — even the one that we have lost — while explaining how they were made. These sharing, transmission and documentation notions are very important for us. We consider it as a personal training, besides the fact it increases our knowledge, this is an opportunity to learn how to structure and formalize our thoughts. In our education, we have mainly learned how to produce images (not words). However, most of our clients, by their university careers, are more sensitive to words. Being able to put words to our projects and argue them is essential to reach our clients and defend our ideas as best as possible. Today the blog is working very well. We try to keep pace with one or two publications per week… It is definitely a strong part of our job. Interview conducted in April 2015 & May 2016 ©ktlg