Ici la Lune, success story of 3 digital enthusiasts

- It all began in Amiens at the École Supérieure d'Art et de Design in 1992. It was the discovery of the Macintosh, typography and software that we used with great enthusiasm to create graphic creations, 3D images, plans, videos, etc.

In 1993, we attended a conference by the artist Jean-Louis Boissier who was presenting his poetic and interactive works. We immediately realized that the software used (Macromedia Director) was the answer to our desire for interactivity and dynamic staging of our graphic productions.

After this revelation, we obtained from the school management the creation of a multimedia department. There was a before and after Director. The creative possibilities were obvious and from then on, we invested ourselves in programming our first interactive projects: photos, videos, music, animations and texts lived together on the screen in often experimental settings.

This creativity in the service of interactivity has been and remains the basis of our commitment: Associate creation with innovation.

- In 1997, our design teacher Jean-Louis Fréchin opened the doors of the professional world to us at Montparnasse Multimédia, a real spearhead of French multimedia in the 90s.

As early as 1996, our interactive projects began to arouse interest beyond the borders of Picardy. Enough to be selected at the digital exhibition Artifices, at the Salon des Jeunes Créateurs du Milia in Cannes in 1997, then at the Rencontres Internationales de Lures.

During these events, we went from being students to a collective called Ici la Lune and were able to meet many international digital actors. These meetings led directly to collaborations and articles in the foreign press.

Then the public Internet arrived and nothing was the same anymore...

At the beginning of 1997, a major communications agency asked us to participate in a call for tenders for the creation of Chanel's Camélia website. We won this call for tenders and created this first project for our company, just created.

- With the arrival of the Internet, many brands have invested this new medium with the advice of communication agencies whose digital culture was limited to printed media and audiovisual advertising.

The interactivity of the time was limited to a series of more or less well done web pages, far from the possibilities offered by this new medium of communication and expression. With our unique approach, which closely associated design and production, we had a real opportunity to offer brands different projects, more creative, more immersive and above all different from all existing sites.

Creating our own agency is simply about being free. It's also a question of an entrepreneurial state of mind and then it's more simply a direct contact with the client and the freedom of creative and technical choices.

In 1999, Moët & Chandon marked our status as an independent agency with the realization of numerous web projects (corporate, events, motion design, business applications, media library, etc.), including the somewhat crazy Moët Explorer project, which was named Clic d'Or 2001 in the best design category.

- In the beginning, our baseline was Supermedia, at a time when everything was Multimedia. Behind this word, there was this singular vision of a single media and not several media stuck together. This will to mix music, video, photo, typography in an interactive and coherent whole at the service of the message was and remains our difference, our signature.

Our vision is therefore global and is expressed in the association of a great creative freedom and a technical expertise in the service of a client, a project. A website is a series of pages, but since our beginnings we have been thinking more in terms of web applications because this allows us to have a more integrated approach and greater creative freedom.

We consider ourselves to be in a quest for the digital absolute, knowing that we will never reach it but that each project is a step in its direction.

- As an agency, our solutions cover 3 areas: web applications, information systems and motion design.

Our web applications benefit from a tailor-made design and are based on a strong technical mastery. For all our projects, we use Drupal in headless mode as a CMS coupled with our web applications, which gives us all the freedom for the front-end and all the power of Drupal as the back-end.

We implement information systems, mainly Drupal and some other solutions. We provide managed hosting for our projects and regularly collaborate with technical departments (Moët Hennessy, Bulgari, Fleurus presse, ...) as an expert on application deployment.

For motion design, it is our passion for animation and 3D that pushed us in this direction. In 2001, after the Internet bubble burst, we had the opportunity to start a long collaboration for Renault and Dacia with the creation of interactive kiosk applications and films for giant screens. Since then we have realized many motion design projects for Moët & Chandon, Samsung, Darty and more particularly since 2005 for the international training of Bulgari and the event communication of the chocolate maker Patrick Roger.

- First of all, it's about understanding the needs of our customers and advising them on the most appropriate solution. Our added value is above all to consider each new project as a blank page and this allows us to design tailor-made and agile projects.

Our projects benefit from a design that allows a fluid and immersive navigation and that enhances the identity and the message of our clients. We aim to offer our clients' web users a creative experience enriched with numerous features (HD version, SEO, e-commerce, real-time 3D, etc.)

- We are an independent agency with a team of 6 people spread over Paris and Montreal.

The Parisian agency is composed of Vincent Quéguiner as production and motion design director, our administrative assistant Dominique Bons, Nagnouma Donzo on web-marketing and myself, CEO, in charge of design and communication.

The Montreal agency is composed of Benoît Plâtre, CEO, in charge of digital projects and Simon Morvan, technical director and back-end developer.

The two agencies work together on common projects with the objective of developing the business on both sides of the Atlantic.

- This year, we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the agency and it means a lot to us as we have been through the evolutions of the web since its beginning.

2018 is a strategic year as we created a subsidiary in Montreal with the ambition to bring our French touch to Canadian companies and the creation of our publishing project Modulæ.

Modulæ is a solution for creating and distributing animated and multilingual content based on our long experience in creating interactive modules for international training. This project is underway and should be commercialized in early 2019.

To conclude, our goal is to develop our business in France, Canada and to continue to make great encounters, sources of opportunities to explore new digital horizons.

We are recognized as one of the best digital design agencies on DesignRush.