Chasing colors in Marrakech — our creative retreat
A visit to Marrakesh was a great shock to me. This city taught me color.
— Yves Saint Laurent
As you may have seen from our Instagram stories we had the most colorful-ever team trip to Morocco!
While in the past we’ve been attending incredible conferences like OFFF & Blend or visiting super relaxing places in the middle of nowhere in Tuscany, this year we decided to get dusted, explore new spicy flavors and discover the amazing Berber visual culture in Marrakech.
We got to ride camels at sunset (and to manage to get off them), get lost in the surreal vapors of Jemaa el Fna square (#YOLO) and, above all, fuel our creativity with some design & photography workshops.
But let us guide you through it, step by step.
Day 1 — Jardin Majorelle
Switch off your cameras and sharpen your pencils.
After quite an early wake-up and a 3h30 flight (Italy is pretty close to Morocco), we finally reached our destination — and we had the first mint tea of a very looong series.
We started our Marrakech exploration with the lavish Jardin Majorelle, an intricate labyrinth of exotic plants and amazing buildings blending Art Deco and Moorish styles, created over the course of 40 years. No wonder Yves Saint Laurent had chosen this impressive place to be his creative refuge, naming the villa he bought Villa Oasis: this place really gets your creative juices flowing.
But what about capturing the beauty and essence of this place through sketches? How difficult is it to convey the shapes of a very complex cactus? Or to try to depict blue with a grey pencil only?
The first activity we did was sketching en plein air: everyone from our team, from designers, to business gurus to animators had to capture what they were seeing through sketches. When you take a photo, you snap and go; but when you sketch you have to find a place to stay for some minutes, analyze your subject at a slower pace, see it from different angles. It was a completely different way to visit the gardens.
But of course, we didn’t just stop at sketches. Back at the Riad, we mixed the sketches and we divided into two groups: the first one worked on transforming the others’ sketches into a beautiful design (with a defined, limited color palette), while the second one prototyped some animation ideas out of the sketches. Who knows, we just might create an awesome little short movie out of this experience at some point!
Other highlights of the day? The Yves-Saint Laurent Museum with his most iconic collections and the mesmerizing exhibition Design Desert, all about Berber rugs (expect to see these color contrasts in our next works).
Day 2—the Suk
Suk design, aka set design is all about bargaining.
Suk is the traditional bazaar in Morocco: a sort of paradise for all hoarders and bargain hunters out there, where we definitely had our share of fun.
The Suk design challenge was by far the most popular one, especially since it also included our Instagram followers and a discerning outside jury. Things got heated!
We divided into three teams with one precise goal: to create the best set design photo ever made in Morocco. Kidding. Sort of.
Don’t worry, no one was harmed during the process (that lasted 2,5 hrs and not one minute more). Or maybe just some egos, because we learned the hard way that bargaining takes serious skill (our colleague Ani could definitely teach us a thing or two!).
All this running around the suk got us feeling hungry, so we suggest you try tajine, the traditional dish taking its name from the earthenware pot used to cook it (we loved it!).
Day 3— the Bahia Palace & Synagogue
OMG, does all this come from a triangle?
Patterns are a big deal in Islamic art and we were thrilled to discover how they work, starting from simple shapes and developing in elaborate, mesmerizing motifs.
Eager to find out more, we headed to the Bahia Palace, a place that took 14 years and Morocco’s top artisans to build (guess they had more flexible deadlines at the end of the 19th century). This way we got to compare and understand on location how through overlapping combinations of repeated shapes you can form intricate patterns.
Amazing how many things you can do with a triangle!
We dedicated the rest of our day going around the spice market — all those beautiful smells really did the trick for us, or visiting the Synagogue, yet another masterpiece in blue and white. Strict color palettes work wonders!
And then here we were, reaching the end of our stay in Morocco with the greatest challenge still lying ahead of us: riding camels into the sunset, in true heroic spirit (heroic with a guide, obviously). We overcame whatever fears we had and basked in the amazing palmet light for one last time before returning to our studio (and graphic pens) in Turin.
Choukran, Marrakech, you were quite a feast!
