HALO PUBLICATIONS

What is the story of Halo Publications? We created Halo Publications right after our graphic design and typography studies. Since then, we mainly created books. We both had the same approach to designing books and the same influences such as The Werkplaats Typografie and Swiss and Dutch Design. Since the beginning, we developed projects based around our common interest…books. Halo Publication’s approach hasn’t changed and we still continue to work with artists, architects, academics, and anyone whose process allows us to reflect on a graphic form. The final object is the result of meetings and contemplations, deciding on factors such as paper choices, binding styles and layouts. We also work on self-published personal projects such as (Ch)A(ts)ccumalation and our Tumblr. These projects allow us to work spontaneously with the common theme of transposing the content of the internet into book form.

On your website we noticed the sentence: ‘all the projects are carefully selected from the works received directly from the artists. As graphic designers, we work closely with them to design a book that both parts will be proud of.’ Can you explain how the selection of this publishing collective works? How do you interact with your clients?  We work most of the time in collaboration with artists and cultural institutions. Either we contact them or they come to us. Our collaborations mainly go as follow. First, we visit the artist at his studio, and have a chat with him to better understand their work, that we then translate into graphic form. After this immersion into their universe we can begin to work on a concept. It is always rewarding for us to confront our ideas trying to find a middle ground. Since Halo Publications is not our main activity, we wanted to work with a different graphic code for each book. On one hand we have our collaborations, and on the other hand our personal projects. We consider Halo as a kind of playground!

We can count a lot of publishing houses around the world. Do you find particular inspirations among them? Is there a particular visual culture you would like to explore today? We are inspired by a lot of different publishing houses but now that we have to put them on paper, we realise that the ones that we want to talk about are mostly from Belgium! ‘APE’ is a publishing house from Gent, they also work with artists and institutions. We relate to them a lot. We like their selections of artists and how they put the artists' universe on paper. The materials, the bindings…They never fail! We also like ‘Cuistax’, an illustration fanzine for children printed in risography. It is colorful and beautifully illustrated! There is also ‘Dear Reader,’ that we discovered through Le Prix Fernand Baudin. We admire the work of ‘Roma Publications’ too. We are always happy when we see them at a book fair. In the past months, we have been inspired by concrete poetry. It is very freeing. It frees us from all kinds of rules that we learnt in school and that are very difficult to escape from. When someone who has never studied graphic design is designing a flyer or a poster, they seem so free, the don't care about the rules because they just don't know them. Through concrete poetry and concrete typography, we want to reach that feeling again. Furthermore, illustration is also something that we want to explore more. We would really like to work on a children’s book and team up with authors.

What are your other activities besides Halo Publications? Do you work in team all the time? We really like to work as a team, it is very rewarding for technical skills and vision confrontations. People who come to us can find a diversity within our collective, as we each have our own style. Besides Halo Publications, we weave tapestries, sew and works with leather. It is funny that without concerting each other we both had the need to do something with our hands and related to textile handcrafts. Interview conducted in July 2016 ©ktlg