With freaky faces, warped type and happy accidents, Julien Gobled is tearing up the graphic design rulebook

“I feel less and less like a designer and more like an artist,” states Julien Gobledand we can comprehend why. When you have a look at his work, you’ll see how he does not simply set typography and photos; he produces a whole graphic world– the freaky baby-looking heads, the airbrushy squiggles, strong, vibrant shapes and pictures that look distorted, as if they’ve been gone through a copy machine over and over.

The text works like art, whether it’s utilized to interact details, hand-drawn to match the shapes and tones on the nearby page, or deformed to produce a visual fallacy. It’s the kind of work that can just be attained by somebody who’s invested years finding out the procedure of graphic style, and after that gotten so great regarding entirely damage the rulebook.

“For a long time, I tended to want to control every stage of a project,” he states. “In recent years, I’ve learned to take a step back, trust the process and accept that things might develop differently from what I originally expected. This has allowed me to take more risks and move beyond familiar habits.”

As a French artist and designer based in Le Havre, Julien studied art before slowly guiding more towards style. He then worked as an expert designer, splitting his time in between a style company task and self-employed tasks. Now, he works completely individually and has actually discovered a couple of aspects of his practice. “I realised that what interested me most was image-making and visual research,” he describes. “I think my artistic background naturally led me in that direction.”

Motivation can originate from a couple of various sources, consisting of books, archives and web culture, in addition to images come across in daily life. He adheres to a stiff regimen of head-down work in between 9am-6pm, even if he does not have a commission going. “I need that continuity to keep producing, experimenting and developing my research,” he states. His work is developed on experimentation and research study, so he requires to put in the time to dive headfirst into motivation wormholes– normally images discovered online or in an archive, which he will then deal with as basic material. “I manipulate them digitally, crop them, transform them or combine them with other elements to take them somewhere else,” he discusses.

“I’m becoming increasingly interested in memory, in things that have been forgotten or displaced, or that return to us in fragmented forms. As I work, I try to find the moment when an image begins to evoke an emotion. I don’t always know exactly what I’m looking for at the outset. Often, something emerges through the process itself, and I decide to follow one direction rather than another.”

His portfolio is packed with jobs and partnerships that straddle the line in between art and style. Derrière le soleil was 2 years in the making with Vincent from Fidèle Éditions (co-published with Éditions Biceps, and Jean-Philippe Bretin, who led the editorial style and design. It led to a ‘thick’publication that combined numerous bodies of work by Julien, with the image-making squeezed into one extreme three-month duration. “The way interpreted the work and gave it a new dimension was essential; it was a real gift,” he states. “The book became something greater than the sum of the images I had produced.”

For Tranquilizer, the current album from speculative artist Oneohtrix Point Never, Julien dealt with Daniel Lopatin and Elliott Elder from the studio Uncanny. Julien dealt with the art instructions, typography and art work; the cover includes a screen print by Abner Hershberger, while the rest sees a graphic mash-up of visuals– layered type, digital illustrations, distorted photographic images and chunky illustrative shapes.

Million Goods, on the other hand, is a task developed with Gabriel Finotti from Sometimes Always studio for the idea shop and red wine bar in Brooklyn, which wished to reassess its visual identity ahead of opening a 2nd place. Julien and Gabriel shared the art instructions, while Gabriel focused more on the style so Julien might produce the art work. “The brief pointed us towards the Bauhaus, Brutalism and Modernism,” he states. “It was interesting to work with such recognisable references while trying to avoid simply paying homage to them. Instead we treated them as a starting point, drawing out certain principles and bringing them into a contemporary context.”

With a number of tasks in the pipeline, consisting of an exhibit based upon the book Derrière le soleil, for which he’s welcomed French designer Sylvia Tournerie to take the product and control it in her own method, it’s safe to state that Julien is keeping hectic. Who understands what he will develop next– something typographic, illustrative or photographic. What we do understand is that he will never ever stop exploring.

“I want to keep taking my work into different contexts, discovering new worlds and engaging with different kinds of challenges,” states Julien. “I feel that these experiences take me somewhere new each time. They help me break out of familiar habits, see my work differently and keep experimenting.”