Fantastique new work from French design duo My Name is Wendy

French design duo My Name is Wendy caught our eye earlier this year with the innovative D/I/M/E/N/S/I/O/N typographic poster series. The studio recently launched a new site showcasing some great new projects that suggest the pair’s Bauhaus-esque graphic approach is going from strength to strength. Two projects particularly intrigued us – the first being a poster series which acts as a part of a wider project in which the studio creates the fictional land of Meteor.

“This project is a sort of encyclopaedia which collects graphical and textual data. It is a way of understanding this land”, Carole Gautier and Eugénie Favre of My Name is Wendy explain. “We would like to create the people of Meteor, the customs, the maps, means of transport, the written contents exchanged by Meteorians… The poster series presents the arrival of the railway in Meteor – you should imagine billboards across he country.” It all sounds rather bonkers, but the posters look great, so it’ll be interesting to see how this peculiar little world evolves.

Back on earth, another of the studio’s projects that drew us in was the leporello book and exhibition posters developed alongside fine-art collective Collectif 1.0.3 for a the Du Pareil au Meme high-school residency project at Museum of Contemporary Art MAC/VAL, which explored the idea of the “meme.” For those unfamiliar with the term, Collectif 1.0.3 explains it as “an idea, behaviour, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture…acting as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme.”

To design work that makes this rather complex definition more visual, My Name is Wendy created designs are Collectif 1.0.3’s series of images inspired by games like Street Fighter, showing people contorting their bodies into different shapes and gestures. Even in monochrome, there’s a powerful sense of dynamism and movement, replicating the speed memes can spread with.