Back Office n5: Change dimension

Back Office is an annual magazine dedicated to graphic design and digital practices. It explores the creative processes at play in the diversity of contemporary media and digital practices. By dealing with themes such as the code/form relationship, the challenges of creation tools or the permeability of the media, it constitutes a space for unprecedented reflection in these areas. Bilingual French/English, Back Office is designed as a interface allowing the reception of a predominantly digital culture Anglo-Saxon in the French-speaking world, through orders from authors foreigners and by unpublished translations. The fifth issue focuses on the growing place of 3D technologies in graphic design productions. Coming from the fields of cinema and video games, the latter have in fact never been as accessible, whether through increased capacities of calculation, to the democratization of free software or environments “real time” creation. Often photorealistic, 3D is often reduced to imitate photography and struggles to offer a visual language of its own — while there is still so much to invent. Similarly, if 3D is today frequently reinvested by designers to enrich a 2D support such as a poster or website, it is most of the time a reuse — naive, kitsch, old-fashioned, or without critical perspective — formal vocabulary specific to rendering engines. In parallel with the growing democratization of headsets virtual reality, the emergence of “real-time” 3D technologies within Web pages promote graphic objects that combine on-screen reading, interface functional and computer-generated image, which go against the paradigm traditional “windows/menus/vertical scrolling/hyperlinks”. From then on, what are the effects on the reader in cultural, cognitive or sensitive? What relationships exist between image and text in an environment? simulated, whether figurative or abstract? How to question and put into perspective these techniques in a broader history of graphic design? This number attempts to propose various avenues of response to these questions through interviews and articles illustrated with numerous examples from video games, interfaces or films (Tron, Mario Kart, etc.). Back Office is co-published by B42 Editions and Fork Editions.