Fakepaper’s custom ‘ClipArt’ library for publisher Pli Office is ever-growing

Chloé Desvenain and Nolwenn Allarousse of design studio Fakepaper pay a lot of attention to colour and collaboration. Working primarily in music, fashion, art and culture, their main ambition is to create bright, bold brands with brilliant, like-minded creatives. The duo’s recent identity for Pli Office, an office and publishing house in Paris, is emblematic of this endeavour.

“The idea behind this identity was to reflect the essence of Pli Office: theoretical, serious, and strategic,”  Chloé tells us. “It’s the idealised image of what an office represents, while also embodying the creativity of a dynamic book publisher.” The identity works hard to encapsulate Pli Office’s role as the initiator of collaborations and the advocate of contemporary creators. 

Drawing from the aesthetic cues associated with office spaces and supply stores, Fakepaper sought to “inject a joyfully chaotic energy into this ‘office’”, by subverting these common stimuli and challenging the creative compositions of the brand. “This translated into deliberately odd text layouts, excessive use of ‘clip art’ and seemingly anarchic compositions, among other elements,” says Chloé, but the pair also made sure to give the identity space to be more dialled-back and calm when necessary.

Amongst Pli Office’s electric mix of type, illustration and arrangement, this sense of ambience is achieved through the tactility of the brand – an element that Fakepaper prioritised. “Pli Office, among other ambitions, aims to publish objects and books, so we thought it made sense to reference this materiality by incorporating paper and texture overlays,” says Chloé. “Beyond these textures, we also wanted to highlight the materiality of the ‘office’ and the corporate world. To do so, we had fun using hyper-corporate mockups as a graphic element.” 

Where Fakepaper truly sabotages the expectations of the corporate office aesthetics is the abundance of illustration in the brand, tied closely to its typographic output ansd inspired by our old friend – Microsoft Word ClipArt. “Our goal was to create Pli Office’s very own clipart library,” Chloé says. This feat the duo achieved by collecting and curating a wide variety of deliberately varied internet images, including colouring books, pop culture characters, and mundane, everyday objects. 

“We based our image research on a list of words and ideas provided by the Pli team to describe their activities,” Chloé continues, those being research, observation, reading, distribution, collaboration, and initiative. “These served as a guide to source elements for the repertoire. To date, the ‘clipart’ library contains around a hundred items and could be expanded in the future,” Chloé reveals. This importantly factors into the brand the need to evolve as Pli Office does too. “We deliberately opted for a varied and pop-inspired iconography, to avoid the purely theoretical and cold aesthetic that Pli wanted to steer clear of,” Chloé concludes.