| | |
| Industry | Graphic design |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1994 |
| Founder(s) | Ludovic Houplain and Antoine Bardou-Jacquet |
| Headquarters | Paris, France |
| Website | http://www.h5.fr |
Contents |
1996: A flashy looking sleeve invades the records shops. The title screams like a bomb scare out of its fluorescent yellow backdrop: Super Discount. Provocation? Profession of faith? Commercial suicide?
One thing is certain, though: everything must go… The compilation, orchestrated by Étienne de Crécy will soon become a manifesto for a generation to come. The French Touch (Daft Punk, Air, Cassius, Alex Gopher…) will free the French music from its too-daft-to-export curse, booing back at the critics who think electronic music rimes with shopping malls. The people responsible for this graphic attack are just finishing their studies at the ESAG and their logo, made after their office location as shown on a Paris map will become H5.
From jazz to New Wave, from Blue Note to Factory, every major musical movements and their labels have been carried by creative wealth in graphic design. From 1996 to 2006, H5 will be supporting the coming up of the French Touch, by making sleeves for explosive bands such as Solid, Source, 20000 ST, Missive or Pamplemousse. Everyone’s broke? Never mind, H5 will make ends meet by working for the Funeral Parlour Trade Fair. The style imposed by the group from the rue Poissonnière rejects its predecessors’ traditional outlook on life that could be summarized in “beard wearing, pipe smoking and little red book reading”, who refused to compromise with the commercial world in order to reunite with street combat and mass culture.
It is in the shop windows of the department stores, in the shelves of the shopping centres, in the leftovers of graphic design (cheap advertising, users guides, companies reports…) that H5 builds up its vocabulary, preferring the profane, the mundane, the everyday life to the sacred. Following on the Pop Art’s footsteps they will stretch Warhol’s logic, reclaiming the mass produced objects as well as the tools of communication themselves.
From then on, each creation will have to fulfil the client’s expectations with the highest accuracy and simplicity (one must pinpoint the client’s needs and get rid of decorative elements) while being true to the house spirit. This means a permanent play with graphic codes, with notions of recycling and hijacking becoming the core of H5’s dynamics. This way, H5’s graphic designers reveal themselves through a schizoid dimension implied by the creative process itself.
1999, second career highlight. “The Child”, a video clip made for Alex Gopher. By developing the idea of Demon's first album sleeve, where the artist’s name made up an entire building, H5 imagines a city in which each object is made out of the word it refers to. Then New York becomes an animated dictionary and “The Child” tours the world, opening the gates of the luxury industry for H5 (Dior in collaboration with Hedi Slimane, Hermès, Kenzo, Cartier, Zenith,...), of cultural institutions (le Festival de Cannes, les Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, la RMN,...) of advertising (Audi, Citroën, Toyota, Smart,…).
Very uncommonly at the time, Anglo-Saxon bands such as Massive Attack, Goldfrapp, Playgroup or Super Furry Animals commission the French H5 for their own clips. With the Remind me video clip made for Röyksopp in 2002, H5 takes a new turn. By describing the everyday life of a female office worker through the company communication, financial and marketing codes, H5 analyses the individual as a product and releases what an English critic will rightly qualify as “the most depressing video clip ever produced”. Ironically, it is precisely after watching this video that the French nuclear giant, Areva, commissioned H5 for a series of advertising films, borrowing the same concept in order to explain their approach to the general public. The ball is in the graphic designers’ court. It’s now their turn to play.
In a few years H5 has become a multidisciplinary organization that integrates new talents according to different projects coming either from the public or the private sector, the industry or the independent record labels. That’s how, in 2007 the City of Paris asked H5 to create an urban performance suitable for la Nuit Blanche 2007. H5 proposed to launch a fake renovation project of the bibliothèque Forney, subverting the usual vocabulary of the real estate companies. The project caused a shock among the residents. Suddenly what would have been harmless in the outskirts of Paris became outrageous in the heart of it. QED.
2009. Upon its release the animated movie Logorama reflected H5’s obsession in depicting a world overloaded with messages: Los Angeles becomes a city of corporate logos with iconic brand characters as inhabitants. Along Malibu palm trees and Evian hills, the police force embodied in Michelin Men chases down the « out of control » terrorist Ronald McDonald, as the city is gradually being destroyed by an earthquake. Game set and match, Logorama won the Oscar for best animated short film in 2010, followed a year later by a César in Paris.
In 2012, H5 will jump back into the fray. Commissioned by a major company, they will take over the Gaîté Lyrique de Paris with a project summarizing their thoughts about the place given to marketing in our society. No doubt that, in this foretold war between signs and reality, H5 will find their own and right place as messengers.