Maëva’s market

For the opening of a specialty food market and restaurant in Fontenay, in the eastern suburbs of Paris, we were commissioned by the city to design a classic storefront banner. We proposed a 48-hours “graphic residency” in collaboration with the chef-owner Maëva Petit, to come up with graphics for the event instead. We used the project’s small budget to buy a vinyl plotter machine and material.

Maëva’s cooking is known for the use of edible flowers. This was the starting point in our process: we listed the names of the flowers she uses. Like the petals picked to prepare her dishes, both edible as well as aesthetic objects, our aim was to blur the lines between the graphic shapes formed by letters, seen from afar, and the form of words when seen up-close. The exaggeratedly fat drawing of Oi! by Kostas Bartsokas helped us to achieve this effect, as it looked like blocks of color when seen from the opposite sidewalk. We made use of this circumstance to create a range of flower shapes assembled from words collected in our conversation with Maëva.

The flowers were generated with the help of a grid that we also used as a guide to apply the vinyl stickers on the windows.