intercouleur

Down at the Look Bar in the old part of town, a few night birds in residence, sitting on an art-nouveau balcony decorated with abstract patterns. We’ve just ordered a nuage noir at the bar; the house cocktail. This drink feels special here: its taste, look and name suits the place. It is almost as if the bar was designed for this particular cocktail: the 1970s patterns on the ceiling and the dusty furnitures seem to emanate from the glass, just like vapour from a cloud. The place is the perfect scene for the drink. This might be the reason we like this bar so much – what we drink, what we see and what we hear is so perfectly coherent it creates a really immersive experience. All of theses elements combine to create a rich environment, in which the cocktail is the central component. As designers, we pay a lot of attention to coherence and harmony. We feel that graphic design should do what the Look bar does for the nuage noir – it should wrap up and support projects in a consistent way, supplying a place where reality can be sipped. But reality can also be seen as a stage for graphic design to grow. When we finally exit the place, our spirits are clouded. Patterns from the bar seem to rub off on the city – its aesthetic impact softly overflows onto the streets, turning the most serious things into playful and expressive elements. Bare signs look like unknown alphabets. And the experience drives us to rethink the abruptness of the existing systems that surround us. So we offer this thought about the basic elements that we encounter in our everyday lives. Having more psychedelic and organic shapes in our visual environment sounds like a pleasing idea to us, but it might be a graphic designer’s fantasy.