A peek inside the bulging, bold portfolio of multidisciplinary studio Spassky Fisher

For those of you who might have missed last year’s Ones To Watch, Spassky Fischer are a Parisian multidisciplinary studio started by Thomas Petitjean, Antoine Stevenot and Hugo Anglade back in 2014.

The studio has historically courted two main clients in Mac Val — Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne — and Mucem — Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée. But in the last year, Spassky Fischer have been approached by a growing stream of international clients. We took a look at their bulging portfolio of strong, considered design and asked Spassky Fischer to tell us more.

What you’ve been up to since we last featured your work?

We have been really busy these last few months. Firstly, we pursued our ongoing projects: Mac Val’s and Mucem’s communication and identity, which turns out to be bigger than we expected.

We went deeper in our collaboration with Cosa Mentale publishing house. We designed the second issue of the revue Classeur and the second issue of the Essais collection. We also did a book about architect Livio Vacchini. We also worked on a new magazine called Spectre, for which we did some photography, editing and design.

On top of that, we had exciting new comissions, such as an identity and communication for the Parallèle festival and an ambitious editorial project for Frederik Vaerslev.

We also took more time to work on side projects, such as the fifth issue of Revue Collection that Antoine is running with his friends Jean-Philippe Bretin, Vanessa Dziuba, Julien Kedryna and Sammy Stein. Manon also wrote two issues of the graphic design magazine Faire published by Empire and designed by Syndicat .

Broadly, how did your work develop last year?
It was a good year even if there were no big changes. More and more clients came to us, especially from abroad. We also have small commercial commissions, and we are really happy about that. Growing slowly but surely.

Talk us through the three projects you were most excited by last year.

For us, Mac Val and Mucem are still exciting projects, particularly because of their scale. We are doing a lot of different kind of documents (posters, publications, folders, videos, photography…). We are working on it everyday, though we don’t know how it will evolve. Recently, we decided to change the Mac Val’s posters. The goal was to change it, but keep the identity of the museum that we designed a few years ago and that is now well established. In order to do so, we had to take a bit of a distance to define what were the constitutive elements of this identity. Actually, it was an interesting exercise.

Working for Parallèle festival has also been really refreshing for us. It was a short and intense project, with really nice and enthusiastic clients. Because the festival takes place in Marseille too, we had to come up with something really different from the Mucem, and get rid of our habits.

At the beginning of the year, we won a competition and we started to design a new identity for the Frac Bourgogne-Franche-Comté. This project was really exciting for us, we came up with an open and radical system that we looked forward to develop. Unfortunately, the commission was canceled for political reasons. We were disappointed but it is better than working in the middle of a battlefield.

What’s next for Spassky Fischer?

We recently started working with a group of artists called Fanfiction93 founded by the artists Jennifer Caubet, Lamarche-Ovize and the curator Marie Bechetoille, based in Aubervilliers, near Paris. The printers just sent us a poster we designed to present a residency they’re doing in several schools near Paris. The next step in the project is a book we’ll start work on soon.