Studio Portrait: Atelier Tout va bien
To begin our new Studio Portrait series we talked to our friends Anna Chevance and Mathias Reynoird of Atelier Tout va bien. Located in Dijon, France, this small but prolific studio is known for their bold and varied output, ranging from identities, to posters, to editorial layout, and many things in between.
Hi guys! How are things in Dijon?
Well hello there. Everything is fine and spring is there. Time to open up those red wine bottles again, chill and stop working until too late.
We’ve watched your work for a few years now and are constantly impressed by new projects. How have you grown as people, and as a studio, in the last few years? What valuable things have you learned?
Well first of all, thanks a lot. We hope that somehow we might find the time to finally work on a new website (with a few more Grilli Type related projects), so you still have more to discover; hopefully sooner than later!
With Anna, we are often caught spending way too much time working. Which leads us to believe that we find it very difficult to take a break and step back to observe and analyze how our works and ourselves are evolving. It’s a tricky question. To make it short, we launched Atelier Tout va bien, right after our diplomas, which was only five years ago. We did not work as apprentices, or as an assistant in an agency or a smaller studio. So naturally, our mistakes were our biggest source of learning… and of course they still are! Eventually, we quickly discovered that while studying, most French art schools are definitely teaching you how to be a thinker. Of course we believe that is a formidable asset. But somehow the “how to be a maker” was kind of missing, which led to an interesting start, filled with highs and a few lows. While learning, each one of us, also had to find its place in our duo. As we modestly worked together while at school, we then had to quickly affirm our specialities to each other, while also managing to delegate, share or split up our skills.
Anna is now teaching graphic design to 1st year students, and has been for three years. Thanks to that, we now feel ”old enough” to take in a few interns (big up to Axel, Clémentine, Eddy and Céline). It’s a great pleasure to discover how it is like to collaborate with a new member. Even with our short experience, it was really an important thing for us to do in order to observe how great their potential is and how the teaching process of graphic design evolves inside the majority of French art schools. For example type design, in France, became very popular (in a very short time) and seems to be a skill that almost every new graduates master quite well.
One of the few trick we’ve learned quickly is to surround ourselves with the right people for the right projects. Easier said than done, as we can often be imposed for example a terrible printer… But still, we will always try to stick to the people who we love to work with and who are as conscientious as we try to be (The Manufacture des Deux ponts and Lézard graphique come to our minds).
Your studio is just you two, Anna and Mathias, right? Do you like that size, or would you like to grow larger? Why?
Yes indeed, Atelier Tout va bien is just the two of us, Anna and Mathias.
One specific thing about us is that outside of the work, we are a couple. We know that this kind of configuration always seems to be crazy to other people but after five years of practice, in retrospect, we believe that this is an asset. We can talk to each other in a very straight forward way. We understand each other in a glimpse of an eye-contact during a meeting with a client. It is in fact simpler than we could have imagined… So yes, so far we both like that size.
But eventually, after only five years of observing how thing works, we can admit that, one day, we might indeed feel the necessity to grow larger. The major reason in doing so is becoming more legitimate in order to ink bigger projects, such as museum scenographies for instance and important pitches for national theaters and so on… It is a complex mutation (especially with the economical context when working outside of Paris) that could probably only happen in a decade (or two!), but we clearly love the configurations of a few studios such as Hort or what used to be the Atelier de création graphique of Pierre Bernard. You can only admire what they have offered, back then, to a lot of young graduates : the opportunity to be thoroughly train to the working world and into several cultural fields, while managing a natural staff turnover.
However, growing does not necessarily mean a bigger team. We are mostly qualified and ultimately labeled as a “print“ studio but to be honest, we would love to find the time to engage ourselves to new areas of expertise such as designing digital publication, websites and so on…
Can you tell us about the new identity for Festival MV? What led you to choose GT Haptik for the project?
This year marked the third edition of the festival MV. We have been designing their identity since its beginning. Depending on our clients wishes, we do not always initiate and design long term foundations regarding events-driven communication, such as music festivals.
It is in fact the case with the festival MV who “mutates“ every new edition. The only entrenched element from year to year is essentially its ornithology’s imaging as the the festival always start at the beginning of April. To make it short, the first year displayed close ups of exotic birds. The second year went on to exhibit an enormous collection of fascinating eggs. To close the loop, the latest edition focused on intriguing feathers. To us, MV is an unconventional event as the musical line-up is very wide (electronic music, indie rock, strange folk, etc) and crossed with happenings, exhibitions, live tattooing and so on. In order to translate the approach and the spirit of the festival, we decided to imagine this identity as a “cabinet des curiosités“ (wonder-room). Thanks to Boris Ternovsky and La Vapeur !
To point out the rupture from the second to the third edition (from eggs to feathers), we wanted to abstractly represent the edges of a broken eggshell thanks to a leaned custom lettering of a “M“ and a “V“. As we have different mediums, each “MV“ is differently designed and composed.
Regarding our choice of the GT Haptik, we did not seek a font that would ultimately contrast with the lettering. In order to do so, we needed to find a geometric font, and ultimately aimed a sans-serif. We had previously worked with the GT Haptik, but after the two previous editions of MV, we felt it could be useful to start with a working-material that we felt very comfortable with. GT Haptik was the appropriate choice simply because it works extremely well at a small size, as every year, the budget inevitably shrinks, which led us to scale down the amount of printed matters and paper space. We also went with the GT Haptik due to the originality of certain capital letters, and mostly, we deeply admire its versatility as the letters can speaks to passive readers but definitely entice active viewers, fond of such typo-tricks.
Can you show us some photos of your studio space and team? What’s special about them to you?
Anna and I started working in our flat. We had a special room dedicated to our practice. Still, more than three years later, it became a real necessity to find our own working place, away from home. We literally could spend our whole day working for 12 straight hours and discover it was night outside… it was simply not healthy.
Luckily, two years ago we have found this great space on the only floor, under the roof, of a small-scaled building. Close friends of Anna, specialized in the field of video advertisement have settled on the ground floor. It’s a great tiny community and simply going to work by foot or biking there, is a major upgrade. Our space is big enough for three or perhaps even four people and we have plenty of room for bookshelves and our archives.
We even have a dance pole, but it is technically holding the whole floor… so we cannot practice on a daily basis.
Can you tell us a little bit about your work with Ateliers Vortex? How does GT Walsheim fit into this dynamic identity?
Les Ateliers Vortex are one of our very first local client. It is a one-floor building, with a few artists studios on the ground floor and a large exhibition space on the first floor (which is why we decided to emphasize the duality of these two levels in their newest logo). We have been collaborating with this very nice team for almost five years now. It all started after we designed a publication for one of its founder, the artist and videographer Annelise Ragno. At that time, Les Ateliers Vortex just launched their first exhibition and already had a logo, but no real identity. So they asked to design their invitations for the next exhibition. We decided to design something simple but strong as we could only take care, so far, of this communication medium.
Eventually, but not until very recently, they finally managed to asked us to complete the circle and design a full identity. As they wanted to base this new identity on the invitations we have been designing for them, it was a delicate yet interesting exercise.
As this identity was managed in different intervals, we consider GT Walsheim to be the cement or the foundation stone of this new identity. The invitations have never, ever, displayed any photographs of the exhibited artworks. This choice of ours is because we believe that designing a subtle typographic layout can actually better states the exhibited artworks than a photographic reproduction of the artworks itself… So basically, every title, displays letters that become images, which initiates a better process of reflection on the content of the exhibitions.
To us, only GT Walsheim allows us to work this way. This playful geometric sans-serif is perfectly flexible. You can stretch it, turn it upside down, cut it and twist it, without ever losing its characteristics that we, and Les Ateliers Vortex, love so much. We are up to eighteen invitations so far and we hope to continue on this path.
Many of your projects are for cultural clients, but your book for Grand Lyon is a little more commercial. Is the process any different for the different types of projects?
To be a bit more precise, the publication we designed for Le Grand Lyon and was commissioned by the parisian based agencySpintank (thanks again to Baptiste Fluzin). The publication was mostly addressed to elected officials around the city of Lyon. So we could say that it is not really a commercial job, but more of an institutional work…
Whatever the project is, we will pay an extreme attention to its context. We feel that it is essential to adapt your creativity to the real needs of your client. So for the process, cultural and institutional is a little bit different. The purposes, the intentions, the expectations and of course the future readers or viewers are different. For Le Grand Lyon, the mechanics of reading were the main focal points. This publication mainly expounds new social policies regarding public services. Its content could have easily been sent in a simple word-made pdf. But the elected members had to read it, attentively… which is the essential reason why Le Grand Lyon has decided to create a real book, as a more dynamic and a more legible tool.
The publication is entirely composed with Grilli’s typefaces. GT Haptik and GT Sectra. Two fonts, far apart, that, in use, respond to one another extremely well. A cheerful and surprising sans-serif combined with a calligraphic serif typeface. The following combination was perfect to us, because two very different types of texts are mixed : rigorous and institutional content with case studies (set in GT Haptik to withdraw the contents’ austerity) and a few commissioned texts by external yet specialized authors (set in GT Sectra for its humanist dimension and because the calligraphic facets carry the authors marks).
Please share with us:
One person we should know about (or two):
Anna — Thomas Mailaender for the fun, Alessandro Baricco for the beauty.
Mathias — Actually, two important guys come to my mind. Larry David and Gary Larson, the perfect American combo.
One song we should listen to:
Mathias — Jacque(s), L’incroyable vie des choses
One link we should click:
Anna — trumpdonald.org
Mathias — You gotta love Rafaël Rozendaal’s websites… This is an old one, but still pretty effective.
Atelier Tout va bien is Anna Chevance and Mathias Reynoird. You can see more of their work on their website.
