What kind of designer am I?
By Adrien Baudet
29 Jul 2007
1. What kind of designer are you?
Graphic Designer
2. What did you want to do for a living when you were a kid?
It depended of my heroes... When I was a kid, comic artists were my heroes, so I wanted to draw comic strips. Tennager, when I saw Jonathan Glazer's Levis publicity at the movie theatre showing a couple running through walls, I wanted to be a pub director,...
I never was into physical activity, I always liked visual arts much better ^^
3. What is it about your design work that makes your photography better? And vice versa? Where do you see parallels between the two?
Apart from doing it as an exercise (see question 7), I don't like to mix photography and graphic design. A "graphic" picture is only about composition, colors and light. It looses its narrative aspect... I like when my photography has a real subject, tells a story or has a meaning. As an answer to the subject "créative license", I selected a picture from a series and removed it by purpose, to male it meaningless. Consequently, it only kept its aesthetic interest. Even so, photography and graphic design are linked. In both fields, composition is very important. Working as a graphic artist, I learned how to visually compose an image, and I don't need to think about it when I take pictures. Taking photos regularly also taught me to observe. I often find inspiration in my immediate surroundings: patterns, colors, etc. Photography also reminds me that everything has a point, has a language. My choices of forms and colors in my graphic design work must therefore have a purpose; they are not pasted in freely. Everything is there to mean something.
4. What do you find most challenging about your work?
To get emotionally involved with a client's work. I'll explain with an example. I like working for bands because even though I don't necessarily enjoy their music, I can still feel or get emotions from listening to it. I can then transform these feelings and moods into an image. If we don't feel anything for a certain subject, we fall into a pattern of producing the same meaningless things, that don't purvey anything.
Photography is very similar... When we are passionate about a subject, the pictures we take are bound to be good.
5. Do you have design heroes? Photography heroes?
Thousands ! I let myself be influenced by people I admire. The difficulty is to process these influences to avoid copying them, using them to create something new and personal. People who say that they don't get inspired by anyone make me laugh... Nobody ever created something new without knowledge of what has been done before. Art history is proof of that.
6. Name some unexpected sources of inspiration you've had.
I often find sources of inspiration in music, cinema, architecture or plants. I like to draw plants, to try to understand their structure... They are an infinite amount of inspiration.
7. Do you have any regular habits/exercises that make you a better designer? Photographer?
It happens (relating to question 3) that I take pictures that are purely graphic. I see it as a good exercise of visual composition, but I think that we shouldn't stop at making this type of photography. Sketching is also an excellent exercise because the way we observe a subject is very different from taking pictures. To sketch, we have to forget our knowledge of that object or subject in order to look at it for what it is. Otherwise, we have a tendency to interpret or stylise, which is not the point of observation sketches.
