About
Last Updated (Thursday, 24 July 2008 06:02) Monday, 07 July 2008 00:00
My name is Gregory Moulinet, welcome inside my digital notebook. Where come from the words we use? How do we communicate beyond translation & borders? What is a "sub-cultural identity" & what branding has to do with it?
I can not remember a day in my life when I have not been fascinated by cross-culture. Design, also has never left my mind since kindergarten. I actually have the memory of these two thoughts being intertwined, when a Japanese kid arrived at my school. The boy was incapable to say a word of French & the only thing I knew about Japan is that they were making great toy robots. The boy did not have friends & I was curious about him. So I came to seat next to him & started to draw my mother, my father (inside a TV because he was a news anchor), a small apartment building (in Lyon, France) with a big bright yellow flashy sun, right above all of it. He immediately replied back by drawing beautifully something that must have have been his family & his house with a giant red circle on the top left corner of the piece of paper. I looked at the circle that was clearly a sun... but I had never seen a sun being drawn that way. I looked at my own flashy sun and decided to add a red circle in the center of it... my very first cross-cultural artwork.
If you recognize yourself in this Japanese kid (Sainte-Foy-les-Lyon kindergarten, born around 1971 with a huge collection of Japanese toys you offered me before you left France), do not hesitate to contact me... & let's have a beer since I am now based in Tokyo.
Since then, cross-culture has driven most of my approach of life & work. Crossing-cultures is just an infinite creative approach using accidents, contrasts & congruences between an exotic culture & a better known one to generate or discover something new & fresh. Cross-culture is not all about national culture. Crossing-culture can be done between generations, genders & social sub-cultures. In the field of branding, we are mostly talking about cultural identity.
Design, in my life, has evolve from drawing, to engraving & photography, to contemporary arts, to graphic design, to architecture & lighting design, to 3d character design & motion picture special effects & now to branding. The commonality between all these practices is "disegno", the renaissance concept of using drawing at the center of all creative practices to "present an idea in perspective".
The very elastic word, "Branding", end-up closing the circle between culture & design, reassembling in a useful way, most of my experience & knowledge in drawing, art, semiology & the various cultures I have deeply interacted during the course of my life.
Before preparing a major artistic project I often collect various documents inside a box to help me encapsulate my ideas & generate an epiphany in me. This digital notebook tries to be this box. No particular order, dubious choices, accidental coherences & the joy to collect what attract my cross-cultural curiosity.
the Nomadesigner
In 2006, I co-founded with my wife Yoko, NOMADESIGN Inc., a nomadic creative tribe, specialized in cross-cultural branding. The word "nomadesigner" come to define perfectly my practice & life as well as other creative nomad I came to cross paths.
In a nutshell, I was born in France & spent half of my childhood, bored to death in the local public school system. The other half was spent at drawing, skateboarding & discovering new countries. My father was a reporter & discovering the world was for both of us our number one priority. The only problem is that design & traveling don't go well together. But since the day I left school (16 years old), I somehow manage to do that, starting by traveling in Europe & North Africa, then later on, Asia, with Japan in which I stayed the first time more than 8 years, to New York & Miami in which I based myself there for a total of 5 years. I am now currently based in Tokyo, but travel whenever possible, between Europe & the US.
In terms of work, I started (at 16) as an illustrator & graphic designer for the Commercial Chamber of Grenoble (France). I managed to enter the Art School of that city & graduated magna cum laude, that is, according to my mother, " a miracle", considering my previous achievements in learning anything. At that point I was exhibiting as an artist & my focus was mostly about contemporary arts, seeing graphic design as my bread & butter. Since I wanted a little bit more than bread & butter & since art was not providing any of them, I turned my focus more seriously on design & became a graphic designer/art director in a small ad agency in Tokyo. I later did the same job in Paris, & New York.
While in New York during the dramatic events of 9/11, I decided to create an online logo design service. The site was ranked among the top 3 on google & yahoo for 4 years, providing me with a huge stream of customers & giving me the opportunity to work from anywhere I wanted. I ended up creating more 500 corporate & product identities for 25 different countries during that period.
My current attention is devoted on developing my branding company & forming a family. I am in the process of writing a book & this blog helps me do that. Any comments, questions & friendly word of support are welcome & deeply appreciated. I also do my best to answer all of them from This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Thank you for browsing by!
Greg
Written by G. Moulinet You are reading About Gregory Patrick Moulinet, Nomadesigner articles
