Alyssia Lou: Art Director of 032c
Alyssia Lou is a French art director and designer with a special ability to be understated, loud, and lightyears ahead simultaneously. She is the new art director of 032c in Berlin and the founder of Single Eyelid Books, an independent online bookshop focused on Asian cultures and out-of-print publications. In 2019 she shouted new life into the Guerrilla Girls text for IDEA Japan. Her brain operates like a brilliantly chaotic search engine.
Single Eyelid Books
Mika Ninagawa · Courtesy Single Eyelid
She grew up in Bondy, a Parisian suburb she describes with characteristic wit as "more commonly known as Mbappe's town." From there to London, then Berlin, armed with a master's in graphic design and a worldview that treats high and low culture as equally worthy of obsessive study. The book design of Jomohomo with Abake about the artist Ingrid Hora, published by Dent-de-Leone, set the paradigm for how she works and her taste. "That moment in time defines my way of approaching design, of working, and of communicating today."
In 2019 she contributed "The Advantages of Being a Woman Designer" for IDEA Magazine no. 386, a nod to the Guerrilla Girls' iconic 1988 poster, using design itself as a feminist intervention. It signals a creator who won't separate her politics from her practice, who understands that every layout choice is also a statement about who gets seen and how.
Ask Alyssia Lou about her influences and you don't get a tidy list of Bauhaus masters and Swiss typography. You get a manifesto disguised as a mood board.
"The margins aren't marginal. They're where the real conversations happen."
When asked about navigating the pandemic's upheaval, Lou delivers a perfectly calibrated response: "Metro-boulot-dodo, minus the metro."
For the uninitiated, this French phrase literally means metro-work-sleep, slang for the soul-crushing daily grind, the mechanical rhythm of commute-labor-collapse-repeat. Lou's edit is brutal in its simplicity: remove the transit, the physical movement through the city, the accidental encounters, the stolen moments between destinations. What remains? Work and sleep. The insular rhythm of lockdown distilled into five words.
Akemi Kobayashi x Mika Ninagawa
ChANplOO, 2002 · Single Eyelid Books
Single Eyelid is an independent online bookshop focused on Asian cultures, offering a carefully curated collection of out-of-print publications and printed matter, covering subjects from the arts to social movements. Titles are available in very limited quantity.
- High and low are social constructs, not aesthetic truths. Georgia O'Keeffe's grocery lists matter as much as her paintings. eBay is an archive. Pay attention.
- Collaboration is methodology. The best work happens in conversation, not isolation. Design is dialogue.
- Your politics are inseparable from your pixels. Every typeface choice, every image crop, every white space is a statement about power and visibility.
- The weird detail is often the most honest. An 18-inch Stonehenge. A rejected flag. The moment when form fails and reveals something true.
- Context is everything; commute is context. When you remove the metro, you don't just lose transit. You lose the accidental, the public, the between-spaces where culture actually lives.
Reposts of 20 YEARS, a 28-page fold-out in the issue №38 of 032c.