Interview of Kiluka, the Swiss designer on the rise

Loïc “Kiluka” Dupasquier is a 20 years-old Swiss designer specialized in web. The stunning quality of his works has been recently reward by a prestigious FWA. Meet an artist which has a bright future ahead of him.

Hi Loïc! A very classical question to begin: can you introduce yourself in a few lines?

Hi Nico !

So first of all I’m Loïc Dupasquier but I prefer my pseudonym, Kiluka. I’m a 20 years-old young Swiss designer and I’ve just finished my 8 months internship at Fcinq as part of my studies in art and multimedia that I will also finish soon.

Tell us about your studies in Eikon School in Switzerland. What do you learn? What are its strong and weak points?

It’s a kind of “holdall” of design, knowing that we learn almost every domain. I’ve personally learned graphic, illustration, photography, video, 3D, motion, typography, webdesign, history of art and even a bit of marketing.

The advantage is clear: we learn about everything, which enable us to know the exact role of each person we are working with. Moreover, you can do several jobs; you have more possibilities for your projects.

But learning everything has also weak points, because at the end you have the bases in every domain but you’re not really good at one. At least you’re not good as a specialized person can be. The solution is to work a lot personally outside school or in your internship to reach a higher level and succeed in being a specialist in a particular field.

Where does your idea of putting yourself with different looks in the spotlight on your portfolio come from?

When finishing the design of my website, I told myself that integrating a video in the background can be very cool. I’ve received remarks from many friends about the website. They said that it doesn’t really represent my personality. So I had the idea to integrate myself in the background in different ways that show who I am really. All I need was one or two lights and a Canon SLR to film that and that was it!

What is represented in your logo? What notions have you tried to transmit through this one?

I was looking for a logo, but I wanted something non temporal, a symbol without typography. As a result I thought of the coat of arms from the middle ages and I finally choose the two headed eagle because it is the one which best represents the designers qualities: freedom, flexibility, open-mindedness and efficiency.

Your portfolio has been featured by the prestigious FWA, you are probably one on the youngest selected designer, aren’t you?

I think I’ve seen that the youngest is 15 years old, but honestly I don’t care if I am the youngest or not. I have time ahead of me and the fact that I win a FWA motivates me even more for the future !

The Motion Design is very popular nowadays and websites have also more and more animations, sometimes videos. Do you think that “static” websites are going to disappear?

We will always need “static” websites, like blogs or informational websites. Besides, it is very easy to integrate some Javascript to make a living website. Now, we see websites, for example Momkai, that look like flash ones but which have only animations in JavaScript. It’s a good thing to see websites “moving” more and more!

As you mainly work on Flash websites, do you have something to answer to Steve Jobs who thinks that this technology is outdated and will soon disappear?

I piss Steve Jobs off. More seriously, he turns his nose up at Flash because they are too proprietary, but everyone knows that Apple is one on the worst firms on the market when we speak about property.

I honestly think that the current industry still needs Flash and until a real alternative appears, no one is going to give up Flash. HTML 5 is a draft of what can replace Flash one day, but we have to wait one or two years for it.

In your opinion, what are your main qualities and defaults?

Hum… Joker? It will be better to ask the people around me for the defaults. Concerning my qualities I will say open-mindedness, ambition, creativity and passion.

In which agency do you dream to work on in the future?

North Kingdom, Firstborn, Big Spaceship, Fantasy Interactive, or even Tha Ltd in order to learn the Japanese simplicity.

Do you have specific sources of inspiration or will you answer that “everything inspire you” like most of the artist do?

Everything inspire me, seriously! I take a lot of time to observe, analyze, think and imagine with everything around me.

For you, the photography is a real passion or just a hobby like the others?

It’s a real passion! The hardest part is to find the time to retouch these because I often spend a lot of hours on this before obtaining the researched result. I’m hard on my photos.

If you weren’t a webdesigner, what will you be?

Industrial designer, typographer, fashion designer or musician.

Anything else?

A little big up to the entire team and to all the formers of Fcinq, to Vincent who has coded my website, to Julien and Giannina of Media8, to my class buddies, to everyone I love, my friends, my family and to the people who follow me on Twitter !

Thanks a lot for this interview.