Rigollet was born in La Rochelle, a picturesque coastal city in southwestern France. During a study-abroad program, she learned printmaking and illustration at New York’s Parsons School of Design, and in 2017 she graduated with a Masters in graphic design from the historic École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Today she creates brand identities, album artwork, illustrations, books, and magazines. While you’re more likely to find her behind a computer screen than a screen print, her infatuation with old-school techniques inspires her digital work.

“I love bringing those processes into my more digital commissions,” she says. “My printmaking background also informs the process here, as I often think of colors as layers. Color is as important as typography and layout. It’s instrumental in achieving the ambience I envision.” Rigollet’s background in print gives her work a grainy, textured aesthetic that recalls printing processes of the past: faded colors, dreamy palettes, and vintage patinas.

Rigollet learned much of this during her 2016 internship at Risotto Studio. The Glasgow, Scotland-based print company enjoys a cult following for its Risograph work. A cross between screen-printing and photocopying, Risograph printing is a retro technique that has become popular with the zine and small-press community due to its low costs and playful colors. The experience led to the formation of a collective named Riso Sur Mer. “We wanted a space to collaborate on personal projects and printed matter,” Rigollet says. “It allowed us to...support each other’s creative practice while participating in the self-publishing community.”

The team, based between Paris and Glasgow, comprises Rigollet, Mari Campistron, Inès Gradot, Josephine Ohl, and Margaux Bigou. They like to share and develop their creative ideas for prints and zines. “One of us will think of a theme, or a particular binding technique we want to explore, and we’ll go from there,” she says. Their limited edition 40-page fanzine, Rivages, quickly sold out.

Rigollet describes a current workflow divided between Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe Photoshop. “[I’m] constantly going back and forth between them,” she says. Rigollet creates her layout in InDesign and the images in Photoshop, while Illustrator takes care of “all things vector,” she says — such as making icons, shapes, and type. The only danger is going too over the top with the colors. “My first instinct is to go all out, so it’s important for me to let a project sit overnight and come back to it with fresh eyes to refine it,” she says.

Her nostalgic aesthetic has scored enviable commissions, like illustrating a feature about the 50th anniversary of Woodstock for the New York Times. There, Rigollet worked with a color palette inspired by the late 1960s and '70s, even down to the faded brown background. The style transports the reader back to the Summer of Love. That is the power of color, says Rigollet. Retro colors and overlays can evoke a particular feeling or memory, if chosen accurately. The secret is drawing inspiration from the world around you, she says.

“As a fun way to get started, take pictures of the sky, screenshot scenes from movies, look at different painters,” she advises. “Open them in your software of choice and with the eyedropper tool, create swatches from the colors in those references and test out palettes. It might lead you toward unexpected color combinations.”