La ministre du Tourisme, de l'Artisanat, du Transport aérien et de l'Économie sociale, Nadia Fettah Alaoui s’est confiée au Canard après l’e
My mom is a fine art teacher and started teaching me about traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy when I was five. I loved the texture of bamboo pen. I loved the smell of the ink. And I loved the feeling when the soft pen nib touches rice paper. Later when I was in secondary school, I fell in love with manga. I had stacks of Japanese manga in my house. I was a big fan of Clamp, a collective of female Japanese artists. I spent hours copying their style of drawing.
Unfortunately, I had to give up practising when I went to high school due to a heavy load of school work, but I always had an interest in art. So when I decided to continue my studies in Melbourne, I picked communication design – something close to my interests but not requiring many hard art skills, as I hadn’t been practising for many years. I was quite lucky as it’s always been easy to sustain a living with design, and slowly I discovered my potential and love for it, and never left designing again.
I spend most of the time working from home. I usually wake up around 9.30, and the first thing I do when I open my eyes is pick up my phone and check emails. As the weather is getting colder and it’s getting harder to get out of bed, I now check Semplice support tickets and try to help our customers from the bed too.
''Learning about things outside of design helps me build my visual reference library. It’s also a good way to get out of my comfort zone and see things from another angle''
I find myself rarely reading design books and only occasionally browsing the typical design sites like Dribbble or siteInspire. I get most of my inspiration from things that are not directly about design. I love learning about architecture, industrial design, photography, illustration…
Since I recently moved I looked into a lot about industrial design and absolutely fascinated by it - the form of a piece of furniture, every curve every corner, the texture when I touch it with my figure tips, the color of the wood or fabric… I guess when an industrial designer start on a new project, they probably ask similar questions as we do in digital design: Who is this product for? What is the use case? What is the budget and who is involved in the process?
The Porsche 911 GT3 RS Lego set! Its production has been stopped and I got it recently as a collectable piece. The building sequence is just like the real-life Porsche’s assembly process. The engineering behind it is amazing - they included everything in a real car into one small model: suspension springs, gearbox, steering wheel, gearshift paddles, engines with moving pistons… and they are all working! I especially love the bold black and orange look of it. There are 2704 lego pieces in this model so it took a while to be built, but it was great fun.