Hic et Nunc

What is the story of your studio ? We met at school, during the third year, we started working together on many projects and we realized that it went pretty well. Naturally, we had in common the idea of founding our graphic design studio right out of our studies. Our biggest motivation was surely being able to focus our activity towards a cultural dimension and having the luck to collaborate among others with architects, designers or artists.

Your studio is oriented on interactive design but it is also an experimentation and manual labor space. How would you describe this work ethics ? We work a lot with digital and interactive design. These are the tools needed to create communication today, whether for a particular request or for our own need. Manual work and experimentation come mostly from a basic need to take time on more crafted creations, coming back to the roots of graphic design and typography lettering as it was used and applied for hundreds of years. It is an important way of working to us because it is also the history of our discipline.

You have designed many websites, can you tell us about any of these projects more specifically ? In all our website projects that present the work of an artist or an agency, the biggest problem is always to find the process that will manage to make this work 'exist'. The design of a book has a number of parameters that allows to translate sensations and reach the different senses: its size, its weight, the feel of the paper or the printing type. All websites are created on a single imposed surface, that is the space of the screen, with specific constraints. They also perform a different function, much more informative. They must be effective, easily understandable. It is not the same reading as a book that we leaf through. The most significant project is probably the first website we created for the painter Gaspard Maîtrepierre. Recreating the universe of an artist on the blank page of the screen is difficult. After much research, we decided to consider the scroll of the website as an expandable exhibition wall space in which the works are presented as the artist used to show them. Then, we extracted from his work a kind of library of shapes, of runes that he uses as a personal alphabet in his paintings. Without nails and shelves, these forms were used as a material to virtually 'build' the space of the blank page, to create hooking points and benchmarks on which we base the works. The idea was to succeed in architecting a virtual space, a 'place' on the web that is like the artist. Making his work exist in another way than a concrete exhibition, but that we can also come visit, anytime, anywhere. This is also the definition that one has of a website.

What would be your ideal creation project ? Ideally, we think of a project that would give the possibility to extend graphic design on the scale of a public place. We would like to work on the development of communication on more sustainable mediums, but also on a dimension other than the one-to-one created between the individual space of the book or the screen and the user. For example, the visual identity of an exhibition area, developed up to signage, even going to a hand lettering intervention. Interview conducted in November 2015 ©ktlg