Airs de Jeux — Contest application

Airs de Jeux ; Ariane Moffatt

Album

Album, Affichage, Vidéos

Airs de Jeux lives in the space between joy and melancholy, between lightness and depth, that moment when you laugh until you cry. The album design revisits the visual codes of old board games while avoiding anything too childlike or on the nose. The blurred checkerboard pattern, which runs through the whole project, evokes game boards as much as it does the back and forth between contradictory emotions. The videos were conceived as short imaginary scenes, simple images, sometimes strange. A world that is a little absurd, a little nostalgic, where emotions shift quickly from one extreme to the other. The challenge was building a visual universe that could live beyond the album cover, translating the idea of play into a coherent graphic language that stays mature while leaving room for something fantastical and unresolved.

Ariane Moffatt is one of the most recognized voices in Quebec's francophone music scene, with a career spanning over two decades. Airs de Jeux represents a real departure for her: a more electronic album, more playful in tone, but no less emotionally serious. For her existing audience, it was an invitation into an unexpected place. For new ones, a different entry point into her work.

The visual identity needed to support that shift without explaining it too much. The world we built around the album is surreal and a little absurd, but it's the kind of absurdity that adults recognize: the emotional whiplash of everyday life, the way joy and sadness can arrive at the same time, the feeling of being a grown person in a world that sometimes still feels like a playground.

The board game references aren't really about nostalgia. They're a way of framing that experience: life as a game you're playing without fully knowing the rules, with moves that can go either way. The blurred checkerboard captures that instability. Nothing is quite resolved. The pieces are all there but the image won't come into focus.

That ambiguity was important to protect throughout the project. The identity had to feel mature enough to match where Ariane is in her career, while leaving room for something stranger and less resolved.

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