Since 2016, the French Ministry of Culture has been engaged in the CAMUS project, which aims to rationalize the real estate layout of its central administration, currently spread over seven sites, in order to consolidate it onto three sites. To accommodate its staff, it has chosen three buildings in the heart of Paris: the Quadrilatère des Archives, the Bons-Enfants building and the Valois building. This project is part of a wider government initiative to optimize the use of its premises. This change may raise questions, hopes or concerns among those who will be moving to a new workplace.
The Ministry of Culture has called on Graphéine to help it communicate about the project. This major relocation and redevelopment project is aimed at improving working conditions, improving the non-working environment, ensuring uniform working conditions, preserving the number of jobs, reducing the Ministry’s ecological footprint, and preserving the cultural and heritage identity of the Quadrilatère des archives, are all themes addressed in the project. The project’s tour de force consisted in carrying out these works while keeping the premises open and operational, in a subtle game of musical chairs in which the teams had to temporarily change their habits.
To serve this project, we designed a visual toolbox in which the illustration dialogues with the Ministry’s graphic charter, which we had also designed previously. One of the challenges of the project lay in the agility of its deployment. Internal communication teams had to be able to adapt to the pace of the project, keep users informed of changes, adapt the building’s signage in real time and ensure team buy-in. We therefore designed a modular toolbox of illustrations, frames and pictograms, all of which could be printed on standard paper formats (A4 & A3) to create customized displays.
