Antoine et Manuel

Antoine et Manuel are a duo who work from France producing graphic and illustrative products, spending the early days of their partnership creating invitations and other graphic material for Christian Laerios. They have also more recently moved into product design creating the first mass produced piece of furniture ‘Cabinet Tout va Bien’ for the Spanish company BD Barcelona.I think the best way to describe Antoine et Manuel’s work is playful with a large range of colours and a strong mix of illustrative vector graphics, their personalities really show throughout the portfolio, creating pieces which other designers would be too scared to do.

My favourite aspect of the work and somewhat of a recurring technique used is the mixture of paint with clean vector graphics, which can be seen at full stretch on their work for AOL, they add texture to what would otherwise be clean cut shapes. The style of their painting also suggests their colourful, and sometimes dark, personas with other pieces having visual connections to the ink blot imagery best known for their use in psychiatry.

Within their work they don’t just create great imagery but they create this whole mythological world full of their own crazy dreams I feel this is good because they encourage the viewer to create their own world somewhere where they feel at peace in their own imagination A+M just choose to put theirs down on paper or plastic in the case of the Cabinet.