Souvenirs de Vacances
This is an Adventure
Salut I’m Laurent a french designer living nowadays in south Germany. Ten years ago I started learning English in evening classes in Lille, a city in northern France where I was born, with the goal of exploring and finding my place in the world.
It first took me across the channel to London, then I landed for work in Heidelberg, Germany, where I rediscovered the German language that I had forgotten since my college years. In this city, a hotbed of German Romanticism, I met my future wife from another city of knowledge, Tübingen.
After we got married we moved further south, to Stuttgart. We welcomed our son. And that’s when The Travel Poster adventure begins.
Family Story
My mother was born in a château farm along the Loire valley. Its castles rocked the summer visits to my grandparents. As a child, I spent the first years of my life in a manor farm near Lille. My father comes from a family of Icelandic sea fishermen and marble builders.
Today I live far from my native land. The notions of travel and ancestral architecture are rooted in my history.
Graphic Line
As a child, I was immersed in the world of comics through weekly visits to the library where I followed the adventures of Tintin, Gaston Lagaffe, Asterix, or Spirou and Fantasio. At the same time, the family inspirations, in particular my mother and my brother, gradually gave me the edge in graphic design. Thanks to an unexpected guidance counselor, we put the name of designer on my childhood passions which I then transformed into my profession.
I started to take an interest in the vintage travel poster by recreating the fictitious poster of the French national railway company extolling the merits of Zuydcoote, a small coastal village in the north of France, in a famous French film “Week-end in Zuydcoote”.
"L’auberge espagnole" Generation
At the origin of my journey, the influence of the Erasmus students of the 2000s as well as the inspiration of the film by Cédric Klapisch telling the story of a young Frenchman attending the Erasmus program in Barcelona to further his career.
Heidelberg was the beginning of my “Auberge Espagnole”, arriving in a new team that was building up creative people from all over the world, from Ecuador, Brazil, the United States, Portugal to Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria. This rich mix became essential to my personal and professional development.
I love this monolog of Xavier (played by Romain Duris) reflecting on belonging feelings:
« When you first arrive in a new city, nothing makes sense. Everything is unknown, virgin. After you’ve lived there, walked these streets, you’ll know them inside out. You’ll know these people. Once you’ve lived here, crossed this street 10, 20, 1000 times… it’ll belong to you because you’ve lived there. That was about to happen to me, but I didn’t know it yet.»
– Xavier, L’Auberge espagnole (2002), written by Cédric Klapisch