Alexis Jamet's animations are warm, nostalgic and beautiful in their simplicity

Growing up shooting skateboard videos with his friends, Paris-based designer Alexis Jamet was tasked with making the titles and illustrations for these early creations. Eventually branching into producing zines about the Paris skate scene, he coupled this creative pursuit with clothing and board design for his local skate shop. “I then wanted to study filmmaking, but I wasn’t academic enough, so I found a hand lettering school which was a better option me,” he tells It’s Nice That. “After that, I naturally drifted into graphic design and, more recently, animation.”

Boasting impressive clientele including Nike, Dickies, Rimowa, Farfetch and L’Officiel magazine, Alexis has a multidisciplinary approach that opens up briefs to a myriad of possibilities. His portfolio is full of wonderful animated work, often bursting with colour and a grainy aesthetic that is dreamy and nostalgic. “It’s only within the last couple of years that illustration and, by extension, animation has become a part of my actual job,” he explains. “This is also partly due to the fact that I become bored very quickly, so my work is constantly changing and evolving.”

Speaking on his process, Alexis says his animations are a 50/50 split between digital and analog: “It’s comprised of digital or hand-drawn work that is printed on different printers and then scanned.” The end result is a collection of videos that can either tastefully communicate products and events for companies or fulfil his own creative desires in personal projects. Reminiscent of lo-fi home videos, Alexis’s aesthetic is warm and captivating, with illusory patterns and movement.

One of the latter that Alexis is particularly proud of is a pair of flip books titled Coup De Vent, made for the publishing house Editions Cacahuètes. One inspired by a Spencer Gore painting of houses in Letchworth, and the other by quintessential English landscapes, the tiny books are beautiful in their simplicity. “I wanted to change the usual function of a flip book, which tries to show a lot of information in a small amount of time,” he says. “I designed it so that when you flip through the first time it’s difficult to identify the action, and it’s only after success repetitions that the movement is revealed. It’s like a slight breeze that appears in the image as if it was produced by the rapid movement of the pages," portrayed by his careful touch of animation.