1718 Paris website

1718 is an art direction agency that combines film production and photography. 1718 was started in 2017 by Rebecca Miquel, a protagonist in the field of advertising who became film producer, and Nicolas Huet Greub, agent for photographers. Their aim in combining both their activities was to create a multimodal entity in which they could promote their crew of film directors and photographers for the beauty market and especially for luxury brands.

The website of 1718 was designed by Léna Araguas and Alaric Garnier. Their graphic interpretation of 1718’s position was a black and white identity, with a cinematic dramaturgy: the visitor arrives on the homepage and faces an all-screen logotype made of biline numerals which then morphs to a much smaller size and aligns to the top left corner. The page changes to a center-aligned list of the agency’s projects, with the peculiarity that when hovering over each of the project titles, a still image or a short video clip appears. This fast changing look of the website gives an impression of profusion and mobility, both dear to the agency, which needs to play on the diversity of their crew. There is an interesting balance between the space given to text and image: the project list, set in Big Daily from Production Type, is displayed in a wide size and fills the whole screen; however, the attention really is grabbed by the videos and their smooth transitions, even though they appear as small thumbnails in the middle of the page. On the other hand, the pages dedicated to the projects put the highlight on the photographic images, shown in a square mosaic with the description in small size on top of the page, this time set in an unreleased monospaced version of Big Daily.

Big Daily used in such a big size adds sophistication to the identity of the website: as the type was inspired by newspaper typefaces in small sizes, the peculiarities of the design are made more visible and offer an originality to the text.