Bonjour Garçon combines photography and graphic design to make "strong and delicate" work

The brainchild of designers Romain Fritiau and Pierre Tostain, Bonjour Garçon is a studio with a distinct visual language, despite having only started working together in 2017. With a portfolio that consists of photography and graphic design, Romain and Pierre produce work that merges the two in a series of considered and clean projects.

“Our work lies between minimalism, typographic research and poetry,” describe the studio of its identities and printed matter, featuring accomplished photography balanced by simple yet pleasing typographic solutions. “In photography, we mainly work with natural light: we are looking for honesty and sincerity,” Romain and Pierre explain, “in graphic design, it’s the same: we are looking for strength with purification.”

When designing, these simple typographic solutions are born from an appreciation of text as a graphic ornament in itself. When working on the identity for the Oleg Gallery, the pair created business cards (and other material) which are completely free from imagery or colour. “Together with the designer of the gallery, who has a passion for words, we decided to write the important information about the gallery in sentences,” they add. In order to balance this simple move, Romain and Pierre created a poster system which combines exhibition imagery with block colours providing an inviting option when attracting attention is the most important factor.

As well as working for cultural institutions such as galleries, the pair’s interests in “cinema sequences, literature, discussions, videos games, landscapes or fashion shows” sees them working with a range of clients, for example, music label Cycladic. The label is well known for the variety of artists it represents and so Romain and Pierre used this factor to create its visual landscape. “We decided to work with holographic paper and by doing so, take advantage of its unlimited reactivity to light,” they recall, “ the holographic paper has as many visual answers as the music has variations.”

It’s this pragmatic yet inventive approach to design which makes Bonjour Garçon’s projects so satisfying. Well thought out, with “strong and delicate” work, Romain and Pierre conjure up solutions which simply make sense.