Meet Paul&Thomas, the playfully precise studio built on a chance encounter

The French duo tell us how their stories and respective creative practices converged, now shaping their common studio.

Date
31 July 2025

Paul&Thomas is a dynamic studio hailing from Rennes, consisting of Paul Faure and Thomas Hanus. Both with a background in graphic design, the pair met while studying at the prestigious ENSBA Lyon, and their journeys merged again after meeting by chance: “We lost contact but ended up unintentionally sharing a workspace in Rennes,” Paul tells us.

With a strong focus on structure, typography, plasticity, and colour, the work of Paul&Thomas is natural, meandering, and organic, yet controlled and contained. Dialogue is a prominent anchor of the studio’s approach – it underpins the fluidity of Thomas’ typography and Paul’s use of plasticity – all gathering into a playfully precise output.

“After juggling alone as freelancers for a few years, we found decision-making more fluid and serene as a duo,” Thomas says, coming together after having collaborated on respective projects which “rapidly turned into a willingness to establish a common studio”. Now sitting within the cultural industries in both private and public sectors, Paul&Thomas work across book design, identities, wayfinding, web design, and exhibition design.

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Paul&Thomas: Booklet for TALM École supérieure d’art et de design, France (Copyright © Paul&Thomas, 2023)

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Paul&Thomas: Visual identity and website for art gallery « Espace Artbausa Crozon » (France) specialized in contemporary ceramics (Copyright © Paul&Thomas, 2025)

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Copyright © Paul&Thomas, 2025

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Copyright © Paul&Thomas, 2025

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Paul&Thomas: Design exhibit for Troisième Nature, exhibition by french photographer Grégoire Eloy, Les Champs Libres, Rennes (FR) (Copyright © Grégoire Eloy, 2025)

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Paul&Thomas: Design exhibit for Troisième Nature, exhibition by french photographer Grégoire Eloy, Les Champs Libres, Rennes (FR) (Copyright © Grégoire Eloy, 2025)

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Copyright © Paul&Thomas, 2025

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Paul&Thomas: Visual identity and poster design for live exhibition Les jardins de l’avenir, Deauville (France) by Lou Forster and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Copyright © Paul&Thomas, 2025)

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Paul&Thomas: Visual identity and poster exhibition for art gallery « Espace Artbausa Crozon » (France) specialized in contemporary ceramics (Copyright © Paul&Thomas, 2025)

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Paul&Thomas: Design exhibit for Troisième Nature, exhibition by french photographer Grégoire Eloy, Les Champs Libres, Rennes (FR) (Copyright © Gaëlle Évellin, 2025)

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Paul&Thomas: Page à la main : Lucinda Childs et les pratiques de lettre dansée, book design for Lou Forster (abd content), (Copyright © Paul&Thomas, 2024)

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Paul&Thomas: Booklet design published by Maurice Chalumeau Centre in Sexual Sciences, University of Geneva (Copyright© Paul&Thomas, 2024)

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Paul&Thomas: Design exhibit for Troisième Nature, Les Champs Libres, Rennes (Copyright © Grégoire Eloy, 2025)

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Paul&Thomas: Booklet design published by Maurice Chalumeau Centre in Sexual Sciences, University of Geneva (Copyright© Paul&Thomas, 2024)

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Copyright © Paul&Thomas

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About the Author

Sudi Jama

Sudi Jama (they/them) is a junior writer at It’s Nice That, with a keen interest and research-driven approach to design and visual cultures in contextualising the realms of film, TV, and music.

sj@itsnicethat.com

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