By: Charlotte West | March 31, 2010
Emmanuel Romeuf
From: The Alps
Lives in: Paris
Age: 27
URL: emmanuelromeuf.fr
French graphic designer Emmanuel Romeuf surrounds himself with an idiosyncratic display of objects that inspire him: a giant Mickey Mouse lollipop, Milton Glaser’s Bob Dylan poster, a family of small plastic dogs (he hopes to adopt a nonplastic Italian greyhound in the near future), and a collection of New Age vinyl records. “If they are beautiful, cool, and weird, I buy them!” Romeuf declares. “Then I realize that most of them are New Age music.”
Romeuf often browses the music section of his local library, which adds a certain je ne sais quoi to his design. “I can find anything: a band I love, a band I’ve heard of, or just a beautiful cover,” he says. “Depending on what I’ve found, it can really give a taste, a color, to my work.” Although the majority of Romeuf’s commercial design is done on the computer— in fact, he’s been commissioned by Adobe to create a piece of artwork using the newest version of Illustrator—he also loves the hand-made, particularly when it comes to his personal projects. “Ideas take shape with my hands,” he says.
In 2006, with two friends from school, he started a small atelier called Mademoiselle, Messieurs in Lyon, where they worked for a variety of clients. Although he moved from Lyon to Paris almost two years ago, Romeuf is torn between the arts and culture offered by urban life in Paris and the relatively bucolic existence of Lyon, and he is only now getting used to “the big city rush.”
He remains nostalgic for the years he spent as a teenager in the Alps of France and Switzerland. “I might seem like a French romantic, but nature inspires me a lot,” he says. “I have a small voice inside of me that tells me: ‘You need mountains and fir trees.’”
Poster for an arts festival in Villeurbanne, France. Art direction: Mademoiselle, Messieurs (Emmanuel Romeuf, Tom Henni, Émilie Chéron).
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About the author:
Charlotte West is a Seattle-based writer who recently returned to theUnited States after six years abroad in Stockholm, Sweden. She writesabout design for a number of publications in the US and UK, includingIcon, Step, Varoom and Men’s Journal. She is also an editor at largefor Elemente magazine in Canada.