French Ministry of Culture
Camus project
Communication about office renovation

Since 2016, the French Ministry of Culture has been engaged in the CAMUS project, which aims to rationalize the real estate layout of its central administration, currently spread over seven sites, in order to consolidate it onto three sites. To accommodate its staff, it has chosen three buildings in the heart of Paris: the Quadrilatère des Archives, the Bons-Enfants building and the Valois building. This project is part of a wider government initiative to optimize the use of its premises. This change may raise questions, hopes or concerns among those who will be moving to a new workplace.

The Ministry of Culture has called on Graphéine to help it communicate about the project. This major relocation and redevelopment project is aimed at improving working conditions, improving the non-working environment, ensuring uniform working conditions, preserving the number of jobs, reducing the Ministry's ecological footprint, and preserving the cultural and heritage identity of the Quadrilatère des archives, are all themes addressed in the project. The project's tour de force consisted in carrying out these works while keeping the premises open and operational, in a subtle game of musical chairs in which the teams had to temporarily change their habits.

To serve this project, we designed a visual toolbox in which the illustration dialogues with the Ministry's graphic charter, which we had also designed previously. One of the challenges of the project lay in the agility of its deployment. Internal communication teams had to be able to adapt to the pace of the project, keep users informed of changes, adapt the building's signage in real time and ensure team buy-in. We therefore designed a modular toolbox of illustrations, frames and pictograms, all of which could be printed on standard paper formats (A4 & A3) to create customized displays.

For each building, a pictogram and graphic pattern have been designed. The aim is to immediately identify which building we're talking about. Together, the 3 pictograms form the Camus project logo.

Illustrations

The brief was to create a series of generic illustrations to communicate the various themes of the project. The illustrative style was deliberately soft and gentle, in perfect contrast to the Ministry's very "square" graphic charter. Each illustration is conceived as a panorama in which it is possible to reframe to isolate a particular aspect.

A modular design

Based on the constraints of in-house printing on A4 or A3 formats, we designed a grid system to create a modular display that could be adapted to the context and easily changed to reflect the day's news. A volume version was also possible, using simple A3 or A4 cardboard.