The Moonlight Riots is the last project I had to work on to get my degree in graphic design. The subject was free so I took this opportunity to reflect on the recent policies regarding the LGBT community, the acceptation of the members of that community and how it could evolve through the years.
The researches lead me to learn more about the bathroom policies, the hate crimes against LGBT people and their recent growth, the fact that a french homosexual can't donate blood without proving a 365 days abstinence and more ...
All of this made me wonder, what if those policies were just a beginning ? What if we had to live through a progressive but constant evolution of hate and intolerance ?
With those questions, I've decided to create a fiction. Writing the life a 6 young people as parts of the actual LGBT community but fighting for their lives in a chaotic future. This book has been the object of a dense editorial design.
Front cover and binding of the book.
Each character living through the steps of this story is a part of the new community that is being built. From homosexuality to transexuality, every character has a part to play in the construction of this new community.
I found it important to give a face to those characters that I was creating. So, every every character had its own photoshoot and to illustrate the fact that every character narrates his own chapters of the story, I designed collages with the pictures as chapter entries.
Mandy Pastel as Lady Grey - 2019
Lady Grey
" Do not let your beliefs die because they are what will get you to live and exist down here."
Maxence Massot as Pavel Kreiss - 2019
Pavel Kreiss
" If you're not able to do it correctly then don't try to it at all. At least not with me."
Lucie Trillat as Zora Iranovitch - 2019
Zora Iranovitch
"After all, when you kill for the good of all humanity, you don't have to worry about the purity of your actions, right ?"
Helio Mendes as Ulrich Villescend - 2019
Ulrich Villescend
" Burned by the light of the sun, I dance in my despair."
Marie Bourcier Bele as Jillian Den Antarctica - 2019
Jillian Den Antarctica
"I can't say we're the same.. You are fighting while all I do is playing behind the bars of my golden cage."
Santana Elvira as Reyson Grey - 2019
Reyson / Lilith Grey
" I'm the daughter of that sick fool you're talking about ! I'm Lilith Grey, Daughter of Lady Grey. This Drag Queen adopted me when I was just a kid, ready to die because I felt a need in my guts. A need to love and be loved by a man. And, for that, I should've been executed ? I should've died for your beliefs ?"
Chloé Barrois as Aisling Jag - 2019
Aisling Jag
" The moon on my forehead was glowing from the light of the campfire that was coming through the cracks in the walls of
my shack. As if it was burning with my despair, this scar reminded me of the lack of luck I had from the very beginning of my life."
The story being built around a community of rebels, fighting against a powerful and armed cult-like religion, I had to think about a way for the members of this community to communicate without taking the risk of getting caught or understood by their enemy. The story evolving around the visual representation of the moon, opposed to the sun being the deity of this violent religious force, I've decided to create an alphabet using the different phases of the moon cycle. Each letter is a different symbol and the language is read from top to bottom.
One of the part of the thinking process around this project was being able to let the jury immerge into the project from the very first step in the room where the moonlight riots was introduced. Giving a face to the characters who made the story was a part of it. But more than that, the creation of one poster per character was essential. The posters are 2 meters tall and are the very first thing you had to see. Those posters present every character with little extracts from the book, photographs of the models, secrets messages translated and pictures of the different secondary characters that are involved in their arcs. It felt important to give a face to every single one of them because they were the ones making the community I was creating. Those people are real and exist because you can look them in the eye and catch a moment of their existence.
As I said before, the project was presented in a room that was only used for the Moonlight Riots. That way, I could create the right universe for the jury to feel what my characters felt, to let them know and understand the story without reading the book. The goal was to get them to open the book, discover the way it was edited and then getting curious enough to want to read the whole thing.
For the future, I want to get the chance to publish this book. I feel like this story is important because it depicts a way the things could go if the activism of our community doesn't keep on evolving. The LGBT rights are not small details in a society. We need to fight for them and for the community itself so we cana ll grow together.
Thanks for watching ! Let's talk about it if you want to discover more about the Moonlight riots project !
