Design & branding


Redesign of Science III 5th floor as a multi-purpose lounge

Given a 150m^2 area, I modeled the area with telemetry and with Blender. Then I designed the space according to the wishes of the professors and the needs of the employees in that building: a modular lounge area that has enough space for activities like yoga classes.

I presented the project to a board of professors with a video of the suggested interior design. After validation, I produced the technical drawings and coordinated with external vendors to repurpose this area.

Multi modal brain research into one mural

Mural for Blue Brain Project

I designed a mural artwork to tell the story of Blue Brain Project that is made of many different research projects at various scales. I depict here that diversity and how each project contributes to a whole. From left to right, biological experiments, reconstruction and simulation. Topological analysis is in the center, as this will help to better understand brain activity.

The board of directors was very pleased with the result and used the illustration multiple times for communication purposes, such as for Planète Santé exhibition.

The mural art was also printed onto the doors of a supercomputer dubbed BB5 at CSCS data center.

Mural & interior design for Campus Biotech

ECA design studio came up with the idea to decorate a library with mirrors and backlit illustrations in a “Tetris” way.

With this concept, I was requested to produce a coherent design with my illustrations, to prepare a mockup – that was immediately validated – and to coordinate with the external agencies for print and installation.
Done in collaboration with Tristan Maquart-Bothorel.

Honorable mention award for this wall

The wall: a competition for designers [CODE]

For a design competition in Bologna, I teamed with architect Julien Audemars to propose a wall unit in which function (supporting weight), ornaments and communication are one and the same.

We chose two locations, the Piazza Santo Stefano and the Kenzo Tange towers complex to show how this wall integrates well with current and past architecture. We received a honorable mention for this project.

Nicolas Antille © 2018

Communication and outreach material

Blue Brain Project communication from 2015 to 2020 was done with the artworks I created. Such material was used for conferences, exhibitions and on the Web.

TEDx talk design

Professor Hess gave a TEDx Talk on September 9th in Lugano for "Professions of the future" and she requested I design her presentation.

However good slides can be, the essence of the talk is in what the presenter says. I tailored the slides to support that idea by combining images and videos while keeping a minimal look. Other speakers were impressed by this effective design – which isn't a novelty.

3D brain models adapted from online scientific atlases (3dbar.org)
Tools: Shaker, Blender, Sverchok, Plexus, AE, Photoshop, PPT

Virtual environment for running robotic simulations

Virtual reality modular training ground for robots for the HBP Neurorobotics platform. The requirement was to have a human environment with a modular part for testing robots in various contexts. In collaboration with Neurorobotics team, we made this virtual world for WebGL to test robots with neuronal simulations.

Furniture from blendswap.com, chocofur.com and grabcad.com

Illustrations for Miraex

Several illustrations designed for Miraex start-up about particularly resistant sensors based on optic fibers. I adapted a turbine engine from real CAD models and ran particle simulations to reconstruct the extreme conditions within the engine.

Targeted domains
Monitoring a jet turbine from within thanks to optic fibers

UX/UI design and Web dev


UI design for an interactive large-scale visualiser

In order to facilitate the work of C++ developers who had no experience in UI/UX, I proposed to separate the heavy-duty visualisation and to create a web-based user interface to steer a large-scale C++ visualization application that could run on remote computers.

In only a few days, I got the first version up and running and this was presented at Interactive Super Computing conference 2016 on Intel booth. Visitors could easily control and explore a neuronal simulation playback.

This convinced managers to hire a full time developer to further develop this web-based UI, with whom I collaborated.

UI/UX for display wall systems

Multiple interactive display wall systems were installed and I worked on their UI and UX. I created high fidelity mockups at real (7680*3240px) scale in order to analyse the behaviour of users and then proposed a solution that was implemented by C++ engineer Raphaël Dumusc with whom I collaborated on the whole project.

This system was successfully used for many years and let scientists and engineers collaborate and make presentations.

Design of a collaborative online space

Fostering collaboration between institutions, scientists and engineers is not an easy task. This website was built with digital collaboration in mind and it allows teams to form and store content and code which can be run on Jupyter notebooks. This platform allows collaboration between scientists and engineers of various universities in the world.

For this project, I lead the UX/UI design and worked with a team of web developers at HBP to implement it.

HBP collab website

The website on a display wall system