Melanie's Lens

When I chose to study digital design over print design, it was because for me the interactive and moving aspect was adding an extra layer to graphic design which I thought was making design even more rich and interesting. Being able to interact with a design is such a powerful thing!

When I was a junior designer, we were making flash websites and everything was so graphic because there were no technical limits to the design. Over the years, digital design became UI design and product design - a lot of websites tend to look the same and it lost the connection with graphic design because it became a different discipline. We are focusing on crafting great experiences but we forget to inject visual personality and provoke emotions. What drives me the most is to bring graphic design and interactive design together. Creating websites with strong personalities and going back to the very reason I started to study design.

It would be Rock the Casbah by The Clash with Blinded Lights by The Weekend.

Because Rock the Casbah is the song I can listen to on repeat all day (the catchy rhythm of the song always cheers me up) and Blinded Lights is the song I can sing and dance to on repeat all night.

I’m not sure both will make a harmonious mashup though.

The idea that it is simply light, chemicals and a mechanical device that can reproduce a copy of the world's image, without any pixel involved, is really fascinating to me.

But what I’m really into is double exposure photography. In general, I’m quite fascinated by the idea of bringing randomness into the creative process. The idea of not controlling everything, creating accidents, letting life be creative. It’s like randomness is an artist with whom I can collaborate. I love to take a more experimental approach and use different mediums in uncommon ways. That's what's truly inspiring for me.

It's even more fun when you can do this with other people. Once, I did a film swap with another photographer. We used a roll of film each, taking photographs within our own cities (Tokyo and Barcelona). We then sent swapped those films via the post and double-exposed them by shooting a second layer over each other's films. I loved the outcome of that series. Another time, I gave a film to a friend in Tokyo thinking it was a new one. When she developed her pictures, they were full of sunflowers because I had already shot a first layer on a visit to a sunflower farm but totally forgot about it. That was such a beautiful little miracle!