Paperzine - News

Simon Renaud (1981) and Jérémie Nuel (1979) established the atelier aquarium in Lyon in 2006 after studying at the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts. They work with the Dorot historical association, with Météo France, with the hairdressers and make-up artists Appartement 16, with Néon (a contemporary art dissemination venue), with the St Bernard crèche and with the creative atelier Epluche doigts.

You have a very varied array of clients: how does this variety of working relationships affect the way that are you yourselves are developing?
We are very happy to have all these different clients. We work with them to build projects based on trust. We are always very conscious of the context where we have to work. For example, we did a small programme for a crèche in Lyon, for the parents: we paid maximum attention to the people who would be receiving the document when we were devising the design. It’s an approach that we always adhere to faithfully: we adapt our work to the people who will have to use it.

Your design work sometimes includes photography, illustration and the many different technical possibilities related to printing.
Yes, it’s true, we work with photography and illustrations. The technical dimension also enables us to add something more to the service we provide and enhance it. We also sometimes incorporate a narrative dimension, such as a screenplay that we transfer into image. That’s what we did for a job we had about genocide: we did some background research, some drawings, sketched some maps, wrote some texts and so had devised our design. We always try to envisage things as a whole. We also create websites: we are interested in all the different techniques.

What projects do you have lined up right now and what spirit will you be putting into developing them?
We hope that we shall be able to continue the working relationships we have already launched with our current clients and also develop some more personal projects at the same time: it is important for us to keep a balance between the two. We have some travel projects in mind that are always a pretext for thinking about new research. Getting away from our roots opens us up; it also makes us more fragile, of course, but that forces us to come up with new graphic objects.
 
www.atelieraquarium.com