Editor’s note: Initially, Sébastien Marchal wanted to be a product designer. He attended the prestigious École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle (ENSCI) in Paris at the end of the 1990s, a time when the Alter-globalization movement was gaining support from students worldwide. Embracing the cause of militants protesting the imperialist policies of neoconservatism, he discovered his true passion: the political impact of graphic expression. A self-taught graphic designer, he was influenced by people who had been affiliated with Grapus, the celebrated leftist French design collective. Today, Sébastien Marchal works as an independent designer for clients who share his political engagement.
VV There are graphic designers who are activists. You are an activist who practices graphic design. It’s very unusual. Even though posters and banners are part of the tools used by militants to get their messages and ideas across, few of them are actually concerned with design, typography, or aesthetics.
SM You are right: I am not a typical graphic designer. I came to graphic design through politics. My interest for this discipline is circumstantial. It is as an activist, quite by chance, that I discovered political posters—particularly the typographical posters from the late nineteenth century, the ones posted on the wall of Paris during the famous Commune’s uprisings.
I am a great reader of sociology. Being able to contextualize social problems gives me tools of intellectual self-defense, to argue with clients but also with my comrades with whom I share political causes. I can tell them that graphic design is not neutral—it is not a mere device —it is a mental construction, with rules, principles, and a long history of technological breakthroughs and ethical controversies.
Because I am an avid reader, typography is critical for me as a designer. In my work, it all really comes down to the question of words. Words are not merely illustrating the visual concept. Their typographical signature is part of the message. I am always searching for a character that is personal, a little raw, and at the same time versatile enough to let me give a specific color to each word.
I designed my own typographical family, which I called Commune. It was used for the communication of “Nuit Debout” (Up All Night), a months-long protest sit-in at Place de la République in Paris. Eventually, the protests spread all over France. Nuit Debout has been described as the French equivalent of Occupy Wall Street.
VV You work mostly for political causes?
SM I work mostly as an author. I come up with visual concepts all the time. I can’t help it: I react to events and issues. To develop my ideas, I don’t wait for someone to ask me for a campaign, or a flyer, or a poster. By the time a potential client walks into my small studio with an assignment—usually for a political, social, or environmental cause—I already have a couple of images on file. And even if I do not have a finalized version of an image, I already have developed my own visual vocabulary on the topic.
For me, the problem with working on assignments is lack of time. To come up with a really good solution, I can’t be rushed. That’s why working ahead of a project, on my own, makes it easier for me to think it through. Truth be told, sometimes I need three months between the first draft of an idea and its second draft. I might look at it again two years later. Then, finally, four years later, something happens, a situation comes up, or someone has an assignment for me, and the image takes on its full meaning.
VV What sorts of assignment do you like best?
SM I don’t like it much when people have already worked out the concept, down to the wording and the kind of visuals they want. In general I prefer to work with my own words.
Words are tricky: along with the intended meaning, they convey the dominant ideology or “docta.” For example, a term such as reform, which was historically a term used by the Left to describe socially progressive new laws, has become synonymous with counterreform. Today, the so-called “reforms” are in fact regressions, inversions of the first sense.
Another example is the use of the expression labor costs instead of wages. The former describes the perspective of the employer—what he pays his employees, a cost to him. The latter describes the point of view of the worker—what he receives as payment, a reward for his labor. When you say “labor costs,” you implicitly embrace and reinforce the point of view of management, not of the workers.
One last example: the money that goes into the pockets of shareholders is presented as “value creation.” Value creation? The shareholders create nothing—did nothing to enrich themselves and create wealth—their wealth.
VV You often use puns. Like the sticker you designed that turned “class struggle” (Lutte des classes) into a verb by simply putting an I in front of it. Is humor part of your activist’s vocabulary?
SM Activists are generous people who love life and who are in a cheerful mood most of the time. Oddly enough, they tend to make sad, sectarian, radical images that value a form of violence. It’s a problem. I have many arguments with them on this issue. If we want to encourage people to protest and resist, it is counterproductive, in my opinion, to create images that glamorize the clash of power. Violence may be a necessary part of the struggle, but it is not the goal in itself. Aggressive images only reinforce the stereotype of militants as being people who only know how to yell, burn cars, and break windows. What is needed is to try to represent what we are fighting for.
VV How would you characterize the relationship of graphic designers to political and social engagement?
SM Graphic designers are not typical “workers.” Many of us create our own business and are in an entrepreneurial relationship with our work. The notion of author/designer is part of our world.
We have other problems, though, mostly stemming from the fact that our clients do not share our aesthetic values. Gone are the days of the great French poster artists like Cassandre, Loupot, Carlu, and Savignac. Today we are in an industrial perspective in all the steps of the production of visual objects. We must curb our own preferences because our clients have decided in advance what the result should look like.
VV What is this aesthetic that clients impose on you?
SM I call it “Corporate Realism.” Like Soviet Realism, a style that came about after the loss of autonomy of the Constructivists. Likewise, today, we are caught in an industrial logic, with the division of labor having eroded the authority of graphic designers. Someone else takes pictures, does the retouching, prints the images, and so on. We’ve lost control over the production of our ideas.
VV How does one earn a living as a militant graphic designer?
SM I am lucky: I own my apartment and do not have to pay rent. If it hadn’t been the case, I probably would have had to make compromises. I manage to balance my budget with a few well-paid projects—there are not so many of them. Unions pay better than charitable associations or not-for-profit organizations. A number of projects pay moderately, sometimes symbolically. I am always busy, though, because I do my share of volunteer work and self-publishing.
VV In France, is the capitalist system blamed as the source of all our problems, be they economic, environmental, or societal?
SM Capitalism is definitely a big part of the problem. The challenge for graphic designers like myself is to produce tools that can subvert capitalist precepts such as profit and growth at any cost. I often find myself arguing about the direct link between social and ecological issues. People don’t realize that they are intimately connected. Social issues are easier to overlook that environmental ones: you can ignore the misfortune of others without feeling concerned, but the environmental damages are harder and harder to overlook. In the end, what will bring about the demise of the capitalist system is its negative impact on the planet.
There is no denying that the capitalism system, that encourages extreme productivity and exploitation of resources, is directly responsible for the deterioration of the environment on a global scale. Partial solutions, such as the development of renewable energies or the management of existing resources, are undeniable progress, but as long as we remain in the logic of growth, they will not make a real difference. One cannot have infinite growth in a finite world.
VV In your opinion, given this situation, how can a designer get involved?
SM He or she cannot act alone. The solutions are not individual. For me, the challenge is to act in concert with others who have other skills, other means, and other experiences.
I contribute a lot by participating whenever there is a protest march, for example, but I also contribute by organizing meetings, events, sit-ins, workshops—or by simply distributing leaflets. Recently, I had to curtail these types of activities to concentrate on my creative work. As a graphic designer, I can be more useful by developing better ways for people to communicate with each other.
My goal is to use design to add more weight, more impact, and more credibility to these collective struggles, however fragmented they might be. There are so many issues that need to be addressed with intelligence: health, ecology, social justice, women’s rights, and all forms of racism.
VV Do you share this feeling and this way of working with other graphic designers in France?
SM Yes, we are quite a few “comrades” in the field of design. Some of them are graphic designers or photographers, but the majority are illustrators—maybe they are influenced by the political cartoons tradition. For my part, I rarely use illustrations. I prefer to make images that are efficient, understated, typographical. In the supersaturated environment of the street, I want my images to stand out from a distance, and for this I have to raise my voice a little bit. However, I do not try to impose a single interpretation. I try to create what I call “depth of field.” I’d like viewers to be able to look once, twice, three times—and each time notice something new.
VV Are some of your graphic design friends critical of your approach as being too radical?
SM Criticism is a French tradition, as you know. It is what allows us to push our analysis, argumentation, and practice further. Not only do I welcome the criticisms of my peers, I also solicit the opinions of people who are not graphic designers—photographers, for example. Their reactions help me see my posters with the eyes of the people in the streets, the passerby who might just glance at my work. Criticism—political, cultural, or aesthetic—also allows me to avoid misunderstandings or negative connotations that I might have overlooked.