Bildung and Bureau Antoine Roux’s mindful interview site Developments is insightful and delicate

Beautifully and delicately designed with prominence given to negative space, Developments provides a much desired digital reprieve in the busy, overcrowded and overwhelming online environment. Concepted by Parisian creative consultancy Bildung and designed by Paris and London-based studio Bureau Antoine Roux, Developments is a thoughtful and unexpected endeavour, very much creating an editorial experience for the modern age. “We should all aim at getting our attention back,” Bildung tell us, explaining the ‘slow-paced’ principles behind Developments’ creation. “You can’t understand a career and realise which advice you could apply to yourself, without taking some time to understand,” they add.

Existing within its own design niche, Developments showcases curated in-depth and mindful interviews with creative practitioners – both emergent and established – allowing the reader to immerse themselves within the interviews through a unique and engaging interview format. The structure itself is incredibly intuitive, allowing the reader to click through the interview by dedicating individual pages to individual questions – breaking up the flow with images, monograms and illustrations. Featuring on the opening interview pages themselves, each entry is supported by diagrams and sketches lent by the interviewees; distilling a personable and deeply editorial tone to the site.

“We looked around and noticed a lot of those media are really good at covering the creative side of things, but less efficient on business and development insights,” Bildung tell us, “we thought it could be useful to develop a specific and simple platform that would contain strategic and business advice from creative talents, addressed to other creative minds.” Doing exactly that, Developments encourages creatives to dive into these subjects supported by an informative toolkit of content and subject that is curated into the site.

Somehow finding peacefulness in its design, Developments uses only a single typeface in its stark construction, striking the balance between human intervention and swiss perfection. Opting for Folio as their hero typeface, Antoine Roux tells us that “what made Folio stand out was actually what could have been considered an issue in a different context,” explaining how the pre-digital era that the typeface dates from became an interesting and considerate selling point. “Folio was never seriously updated, especially for screen use, or completed,” Roux adds, “the family is still lacking basic cuts,” such as a lack of a ‘Regular Italic’ weight, a limited glyph set and essentially non-existent alternates. “Despite all of this,” he explains, “the human qualities, and at times fragility, of its drawing, and the restrictive effect of the aforementioned missing elements, have given it its obvious strength,” he concludes, “without ever compromising on readability.”

Bildung

Bureau Antoine Roux

Developments