Aymeric
Carlier

It started with mess

At home we called my drawings bazardeux. Half mess, half accident.

I grew up somewhere the freedom to make a thing came before the judgement of it, which is why I kept going long enough to get any good.

My grandmother painted. She gave me the one piece of direction I still use.

Imagine what you want, past the horizon.

Before I drew anything worth keeping, I read. Science fiction, then Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Hunger Games. The films arrived after the books and the effects arrived after the films. Once I worked out how a shot gets built, watching one stopped being enough.

The ambition arrived years before the gear. I begged for a PC so I could edit video, and I left one line off the list. It died trying to open Sony Vegas Pro, with no graphics card inside it.

School and I disagreed for a long time

General education did not fit, and I took the long way round.

Those years cost me time and gave me a spine, which is a trade I would make again. I stopped fighting the system the day I walked into the advertising course at HelHa.

The anxiety turned into appetite. I sharpened my eye, validated part of the course in Scotland, then went further with the Motion Design Academy that HelHa runs with UCLouvain.

The design function for a whole company

Since April 2025 I have been a graphic designer in the marketing team at Nodalview.

The visible half is what you would expect: social, ads, print and digital for collaborations. I also own how the company looks to the outside and to itself, which turns out to be the same job done twice with different audiences.

The other half is the design requests that arrive from every team in the building, mostly Customer Success and Sales. A slide that has to hold up on a live call teaches you more about clarity than a campaign does. Nobody in that meeting will admire your spacing, and they will notice within a second if the point takes too long to arrive.

With our product marketing manager I work on the Nodalview marketing site, the visuals and the structure of the pages themselves. And I sit on the internal AI committee, where the brief is to find tools that fit what colleagues already do rather than tools that look good in a demo.

• Brand identity
• Art direction
• Motion
• Web design
• Creative AI

On the AI question

I follow what it does to this trade, and I test it on my own work first.

It handles the unglamorous half: variations to react to, copy drafted so there is something to argue with, assets resized, code scaffolded. The taste stays mine. A machine that writes my sentences would write them the way a machine writes sentences, and you would hear it.

Sitting on the AI committee at work changed how I judge a tool. The question stopped being what it can do and became who will still be using it in a month.

When I stop moving pixels

I watch birds, and I cannot name most of the species I look at.

What I go for is the look in the eye. Five years of putting emotion into a frame, and a bird on a branch manages it by holding still.

The other plan is an e-sport structure of my own. It has been a plan for a while, which is the honest status of most good plans.

Still bazardeux.
Better equipped.