Joss Caron

Updated August 2026

A bit more about my tastes, and the road that led here.

Food

It started in a vegetable garden. I helped my grandparents, then my parents, then I cooked next to my father and ate my mother's bread. None of it felt like learning at the time.

A good meal is still the best excuse I know to sit down with someone for three hours. These are the places I send people to.

In the glass

I lean SyrahA dark, peppery red grape. It grows on the steep granite slopes of the northern Rhône, and it tastes of black olive, violet and smoke., and not one of these is. Taste rarely follows its own rules.

  • Kwak AmbréeBrouwerij BosteelsBelgium

    Amber ale, in the glass that needs its own stand

  • Poignée de RaisinsDomaine GramenonCôtes du Rhône

    Gamay-like grenache, no sulphur, drunk far too easily

  • Bourgogne RougeChapuis & ChapuisBurgundy

    The bottle I open when I have nothing to prove

  • Vouvray Moelleux RéservePhilippe Foreau, Clos NaudinLoire

    Chenin, sweet, and still sharp enough to wake you up

Photography

I was given a camera as a teenager, then a camcorder. I eventually bought a Sony A7 III and learned properly on it, before going the other way and settling on a Ricoh GR IV: one pocket, one focal length, no decisions left to make.

That is what lets me do the thing I actually like, which is street photography, usually with a FlashQ Q20 II in the other hand. Shooting flash on the street is either the rudest thing you can do or the most honest. I have not settled which, mostly because I still have not worked up the nerve to fire one into a stranger's face.

Travel

My father fed me adventure stories when I was small, so of course I wanted to see what was out there. What I do now is rent a motorbike and ride until the road stops being a road.

Somewhere along the way I stopped writing itineraries and stopped keeping a list of things to tick off. What I go for now is an hour with someone who actually lives there, and their story. Scotland is still the one that got me hardest.

  • France
  • Colombia
  • Spain
  • United Kingdom
  • United States
  • Switzerland
  • Greece
  • Portugal
  • Canada
  • Ireland
  • Iceland
  • Malta
  • Denmark
  • Morocco
  • Italy
  • Tunisia
  • United Arab Emirates
  • Belgium
  • Germany
  • Netherlands
  • French Polynesia

The longer story

I grew up in a village of three hundred people. School was more than twenty kilometres away and there was nothing in between. My childhood went into the vegetable garden, the land to mow, and the woodpile: forty stèresA stère is a cubic metre of stacked firewood. Forty of them is a wall four metres high and ten long, cut and split by hand. to cut and stack before each winter.

Athletics is what moved me to a city. Being on the national list of high-level athletes got me into a school that let me train and study at the same time. I spent those years crossing France for competitions, until university came and I had to choose between the two.

I found out design was a job during three months in Los Angeles. Then a little over ten years in France, and Strasbourg won me over. Then Colombia, where I met up with again, who now runs and whom I had crossed the country with a few years before. I built a life there, and came home to Europe for the work.

I never stopped training. On my own time I lead a team of ten in the field, which is the only part of my week where nobody cares what I think about design.

None of that was chosen as a career move. It is simply what happened, and it explains more about how I work than any case study on this site.