Louise Julien (She/Her)
I’m Louise Julien, a graphic designer and image maker originally from Paris.
I work always at the intersection of several disciplines, driven by an endless curiosity and a love for colours and storytelling. Often stemming from personal interests, I visually explore how to make sense of the stories in my head, creating pocket universes and questioning the relationship between fictional and real, dreamt and lived, virtual and physical, peace and chaos. My practice is usually a very conceptual and iterative one, from hoarding visual details from found inspirations to a lot drawing and writing.
Due to our distanced and therefore digital working conditions, my work this year has been primarily focused on moving image and motion design. Due to the conditions of the world, it’s been as much a colourful escape from the unpleasantness of reality as an attempt to find a cathartic way to release the anxiety.
I am currently looking for a work opportunity within the field starting once the summer ends, in the UK, France or elsewhere.
Magical Marsh
The Magical Marsh is a fictitious place that I imagined superimposed on reality during the first lockdown: a place of dreams, of escape and reflection, of solitude too. From this dream and these thoughts a body of text was born, and this [on-going] project is the attempt at visualising this journey. It is a matter of translating a set of colours, images, sounds and sensations that I have associated with the idea of this deserted palace, a place that is lived as both a refuge and a prison, the way I lived that first lockdown back in March: liberated and imprisoned. The Magical Marsh is not limited in time and space since it was born in me, like a mind palace: but it is deeply link to the memories and feelings of that first lockdown. It is both real and unreal, something people can relate to and something very personal, a dream place and a nightmarish one.
This work allowed me to explore moving image, story-telling, symbolism and colour. It also allowed me to work out ways in which my visual work could come into place with my personal writing. Two music videos for two tracks have been made as yet, and each slightly differs as my skills, interests and ambitions shifted through time and research. It is also a collaboration with Hugo Saccardy who’s been my friend in charge of thinking and creating the music. In some ways, I perceive this project as a ‘reverse-album’, starting from lyrics and working towards audio through image making. Each track is a different story but also part of a whole, which allows to delve into new ways of making moving image, different aesthetics, different tones.
01. Ziggurat
The first music video is for the first track ‘Ziggurat’, ‘Ziggurat’ acts as an introduction to the universe of the Magical Marsh. It is a tale of discovery, that of this hidden place and the feelings linked to it. Visually, it is very open to interpretation and presents more or less abstracted images.The place that’s described and lived throughout the video feels driven by natural movements and elements and carries a peaceful and contemplative emotion.
04. SERPENT-VOLANT
The second music video is for the fourth track ‘Serpent-Volant’ [literally in english: flying-snake] where I tell of a dream, the sort you get when you nap in the sun, the sort you’d get in the Magical Marsh. The video opens to a journey from dusk till night, following snakes and butterflies, the lyrics, less sophisticated than Ziggurat, less anxious, gives way to a colour palette that has shifted from more realistic and natural hues to more eerie and saturated ones, a small journey in a dreamlike world.
MAGICAL COVERS ~
WIP Show Identity
I took part in designing the Work in Progress show identity earlier this year, a collaborative project with Natalia Witwicka, Rachel Kate MacLeod and Maria Pelosi. We designed this identity as driven by feelings of restlessness, movement, ongoing work, roughness, which felt heavily connected to our class’ feelings this last year. As part of the team, I was mainly in charge of developing the animated content that would serve to promote the show on social networks.
The identity is based on a bespoke typeface drawn by Natalia Witwicka which defined the type of shapes we then used for the animated content, suggesting the idea of progress and revealing student’s works as part of the identity. The show being presented virtually through a website this year, we also designed this latter following the same ideas and lines.
Project Links
Blue Haired Legends
This project focuses on motion design for the promotion of a fictional collaboration livestream between two artists, Ashnikko and Dorian Electra, that would be produced by the label PC Music. The project takes its roots in the real answers to a tweet from Dorian Electra where fans referenced to both artists as ‘blue haired legends’ and begged for a collaboration. The final motion is inspired by that of a pumping heart or growing and expanding organisms. It plunges the viewer into expectation that something is going to happen in a strange organic universe, the visual identity that represents and embodies the collaboration and the event.
Both artists having a very bold and crazy visual presence and universe, I wanted to convey some of that edginess through a more stripped-back design: based on a font called Fengardo Neue, I crafted a stretched type with spiky ends that had that edge and carried a reminiscence of punk music vintage gig posters and the serif fraktur-like fonts these artists often use. On the other end, the smoothness and blobbiness of the more organic imagery coupled with the lo-fi blurriness and glow of the type brought this feeling of immersion and some softness to the harsh lines and endings of the stretched font.
ON Festival Identity
ON is an identity project for a fictional music and digital cultures virtual festival that would be offering an immersive experience at home. ON would be using a digital space and speculative technologies allowing the participants a sensory journey.
The identity has a slight science-fiction feel to it and is focused on immersion and space. It uses 3 recurrent elements: GANbred landscapes (a technology using an algorithm and a database to create unique images by mixing up the ‘genes’ composing them), 6 flower symbols used for a modular logotype and finally a secondary typeface, Redaction, which is declined into various levels of pixelation, subtly referencing to the digital realm whilst retaining a certain elegance and legibility.
