Today is a big day at the end of a big year for Voilà:.
After six years of operation, it was time to grow from a one-person outfit to a proper company. We are now making this official online.
I always wanted to do more and do it better than I could by myself. I have ideas for what information design can do that go beyond my own capacity.
So in the spring of 2019, I found an office space and started a recruitment process. Today, Estelle Villemin and Erica Bugden are the first two full-time members of Voilà: beside me. They join the team with Guillaume Lavoie who works part time as a senior consultant, mostly delivering data visualization training. Of course, there have been many more collaborators along the way. Thank you!
Since then, we’ve started doing more, adding new clients and doing new work that would not have been as good nor even possible in the past.
Mostly, we have shaped Voilà: into a company. We have rebranded, redefined our offer and, in October 2019, we organized a party at our office to celebrate this milestone with our friends, clients and collaborators. Now we take this online, to the rest of the world.
In this new iteration, it is important to convey more clearly that Voilà: has a purpose. We care about sustainable development, climate change, gender equality, social development, transparency, diversity and inclusion. What could be read between the lines before is now stated as our mission and used as a criteria to choose projects.
We have also selected a few key values that are important to us.
Clarity: This is our core product and it lives in the way that we work. We want to be known as reliable, responsible and honest.
Creativity: We want to be proud of our work, we offer a unique service and original analysis.
Ambition: For us, success happens through diversity and inclusion, continuing improvement and openness to change.
We also want to communicate more about what information design can do and about our own work. This is why we are starting a newsletter (monthly at best for now) to wrap together what we’ve seen that’s cool and useful, and what we’ve done with our clients.
Tomorrow, I will say more about our new visual identity, including the logo of course. Today, let’s celebrate! It’s such a beautiful day.
Francis Gagnon is an information designer and the founder of Voilà: (2013), a data visualization agency specialized in sustainable development.
