Adrien Godin and Baptiste Bernazeau “build an identity around laughter”

For designers Adrien Godin and Baptiste Bernazeau’s joint project, an identity for FIBDA 17 the International Comic Fair of Angoulême in France, the goal was “to build an identity around laughter”.

During the ten-day project the designers decided to visualise laughter as “different types of patterns: oral rhythms, recurrence of laughable elements and repetitive structures,” they explain. “We linked those concepts to visual elements in comics and we respectively came up with onomatopoeias, cartoon style shapes, and basic comic strip layout”. The result is a project of mixed graphic styles that are balanced with precision.

“Each one of the three posters is based on one of the patterns and they became our reference to design the rest of the printed materials,” says Adrien and Baptiste. Building upon this initial design process, “we were then able to develop the identity at different levels of intensity, always in keeping with our concept”. Therefore, the posters sing in a “loud and playful” way, whereas the guidebook, “is quieter and lets the artists’ drawings speak for themselves".

The theme of juxtaposition that runs throughout the project “was really interesting to experiment with, mixing hand-drawn shapes and very classic typographic elements,” the pair tell It’s Nice That. “Times New Roman clashes nicely with those shapes thus giving them a new context and (we think) more visual impact.”

The finished identity “is a bizarre-looking identity in shift with previous FIBDA identities,” explains Adrien and Baptiste. But overall, “we really had a lot of fun playing with the usual codes of comics and their purpose”.