H5

Design studio (1996). Created the logo and produced five educational spots for the Born HIV Free campaign on behalf of the Global Fund to fight AIDS (May 2010)

Founded by Ludovic Houplain and Antoine Bardou-Jacquet, graduates of the applied arts school ESAG-Penninghen, in 15 years H5 has won recognition as one of the most creative graphic arts collectives. Its projects – including the clip The Child for Alex Gopher and the short film Logorama recently awarded an Oscar, along with animated disk covers – have been widely recognized by the industry. Initially, H5, a prime example of “the French touch”, worked primarily for the international music scene (Massive Attack, Röyksopp, Goldfrapp, Étienne de Crécy, brother of Hervé de Crécy, member of the collective) before being approached by the world of advertising (Citroën, Audi, Volkswagen, Areva, etc.) and the luxury goods industry (Hermès, Vuitton, Cartier, Issey Miyake, etc.). Hedi Slimane at Dior Homme was the first luxury house to commission work from H5. Its members, both artists and artisans, have seen their work exhibited in many venues: Paris (Nuit blanche, Centre Georges-Pompidou), New York (MoMa) via London (Institute of Contemporary Arts, National Museum of Photography, British Film Institute) and Tokyo (Sendai Mediatheque).

The Born HIV Free campaign as seen by H5

Nicolas Rozier works for the H5 design studio.

“We came up with the logo at the first meeting. It was Ludovic (Houplain) who drew it on a pad. The red ribbon already existed – it wasn’t included in the Global Fund’s brief, but it seemed so obvious that we were really hooked on the idea. After that we worked on the actual stroke. It’s in pencil, rather subtle, child-like, with a kind of awkwardness, to reflect the vulnerable position of a seropositive mother and her child. It contrasts with the ribbon, which is like something done with a highlighter pen, a definite stance. We then had a long discussion about the color of the ribbon. Red? We realized that all the other colors were already associated with causes. When Cyril (Houplain) and Mathieu (Lelièvre) took over for the educational films, our worry was to prevent the red color being in contradiction with the child’s serological status. For the films, we decided on a very sober graphic approach, supported only by the voice of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. It had to be very simple, because, in the end, it is very complicated to talk about this subject. The Global Fund’s literature was dense, complex, abstruse. Humanitarian organizations are not necessarily used to communicating. We worked on making the message understandable. The words had to fit into 25 seconds. We asked the Global Fund for more themes than we needed to identify those that would offer the best visual translation. We chose four avenues: “orphans”, “drugs”, “transmission”, “support”. This is our first experience of this type. Humanitarian work forces you to focus on the basics, with tight economic constraints. It was a long-distance race – it’s very different from ad