How Wes Andersons Creative Team Designed the The French Dispatch Magazine for His Latest Film

Table Of Content

• “Exploring Unfamiliar Histories of Visual Culture” — Four Corners Books Shares Its Favorite Publications
• Design & Business
• “Books Aren’t Going Anywhere”: A Roundtable Discussion on Publishing and Branding in the Age of Bookstagram
• Gere Kavanaugh’s “Radically Upbeat,” Distinctly West Coast Style Didn’t Just Come Out of California
• A “One-Man Print Archive of Culture, Community, and Social Change” — Café Royal Share Five Favorite Books
• What’s the Role of Branding in the TV Streaming Age?

California provided a kind of petri dish for ideation that was, according to Sandhaus, three parts liberation, opportunity, and community. With Victor Gruen, Kavanaugh designed all-encompassing interiors that spanned material, lighting, display, furnishings, and wall treatments. She founded her own firm, Gere Kavanaugh/Designs, in 1964, and her own line of textiles, Geraldine Fabrics, in 1970.

“Exploring Unfamiliar Histories of Visual Culture” — Four Corners Books Shares Its Favorite Publications

“Gere was of a moment where the drumbeat she heard was truly an American one—one coming from the Eameses, from Alexander Girard, Harley Earl, and GM, who were really starting to redefine an aesthetic for America,” says Sandhaus. The design and conceptual thinking skills she acquired in the short program helped her land a job back in Boston at East West Journal, an alternative lifestyle magazine. She moved up quickly in the company, beginning as a staff designer before transitioning to art director by 23.

Design & Business

When a company rebrands, discussions about the new look push the company into Twitter’s trending topics (yes #DesignTwitter is a thing). Even Netflix got in on the game with Abstract, its Chef’s Table-like docuseries on celebrity practitioners. During a quick scene in The French Dispatch, Hermès Jones, a magazine illustrator played by Jason Schwartzman, gets an earful from Arthur Howitzer, Jr., the editor-in-chief played by Bill Murray.

“Books Aren’t Going Anywhere”: A Roundtable Discussion on Publishing and Branding in the Age of Bookstagram

We asked Frank Martinez, a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property for designers, illustrators and typographers, and who provides counsel to AIGA, to answer some pressing questions on IP and fair use. Utilize our selection of contracts, legal guides, and business planning resources to become a design industry entrepreneur. Support your local creative community—when you become a member and select a chapter, a portion of your dues goes to funding your chapter’s programming and initiatives. An opportunity for designers to give & receive constructive feedback on creative work prior to showing their team/client/stakeholders. AIGA advances design as a professional craft, strategic advantage, and vital cultural force. The AIGA Worldstudio D×D Scholarships aim to increase diversity in the design profession by creating equitable opportunities for the next generation of creative talent.

Designers, design educators, and design students are in a more important and interesting field than we seem to recognize. “Keep your eyes peeled for a parade of covers that pops up in the main-on-ends,” she says. It’s a little treat tucked away for the ones who hang till the last credit rolls. While Aznarez worked on the covers, Dorn was busy creating posters for the sets of Ennui-sur-Blasé, which were later reused as back covers of the magazine. Originally conceived as posters for the streets and metro stations of the town, the artworks showcase fictional products, like a bottle of ‘Off-Black’ cognac, a refrigerator and a typewriter.

Wild, who is a 2006 AIGA Medalist, worked with Steinberger to collect many of the pieces for the show. She moved to Los Angeles in 1985 to take the position as graphic design program director at CalArts. “For me, the feeling of working in California was that there were wider possibilities for form, that there wasn’t the allegiance to corporate, International Style Modernism as there was on the East Coast,” says Wild. Having developed a varied portfolio across practices in Cranbrook’s grad program, Kavanaugh secured a position at Detroit-based General Motors immediately upon graduation. There she joined a group of female designers within GM’s Styling Group dubbed the “Damsels of Design,” under the direction of Harley Earl, the department’s Vice President.

After interning at an ad agency during high school, Sandhaus went on to enroll in a two-year program in advertising design at The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, FL. She was surprised to discover that many of her teachers had been working designers in New York and brought with them the aesthetics and knowledge of east coast modernism and the New York art scene. Eye on Design is an editorial platform that explores what it means to be a designer today. We cover the issues important to the global design world + elevate the voices of contemporary designers as a way to build a more engaged design community. Though the number of pieces on display is relatively small—in all, there are 31 posters and publications—the show doesn’t feel homogenous. What unifies the work is, “the degree of passionate engagement with the material, and with the things that graphic design could do at that time, which are different than what we see today,” Wild explains.

“Simple, perfect”: The 50 best book covers of 2022, according to AIGA - It's Nice That

“Simple, perfect”: The 50 best book covers of 2022, according to AIGA.

Posted: Thu, 06 Jul 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

The educator realized the urgent need for a digital archive of lesser known design work after interviewing many local designers who had boxes of unarchived work stored out of sight. Maintaining a physical archive of design work demands space, time, and financial resources that not everyone has access to, and without an accessible way to document it, that history will disappear. They’re shaped by their environments and the people around them, and it’s through mentorship and collaboration that they grow within their creative communities.

Empowering Designers to Change the World

Pasted on the wall next to Jones’ desk are 12 past covers of The French Dispatch, showing an assortment of imagined stories; in one, the Statue of Liberty in Paris waves to the one in New York, and in another, a group of men in suits break into a dance. It’s one of those blink-and-you-miss-it-moments, which even in its brevity, hints at the scrupulous eye of auteur Wes Anderson, whose latest film follows the staff of a fictional American publication in France, set in the imagined town of Ennui-sur-Blasé. The film, which traces the making of the magazine, draws on Anderson’s lifelong love for The New Yorker, which he discovered in eleventh grade.

The People’s Graphic Design Archive enables any user to upload original work, photos, letters, oral histories, anecdotes, published and unpublished designs, essays, videos, and audio, as well as links to other relevant archives and websites. In uplifting the marginalized stories from design that many of us don’t even know existed, the archive fundamentally de-centers the exclusive legacy of modernism. “At its core, it’s about honoring and recognizing that everything is valued, every person is valued, and that anyone can contribute to preserving graphic design history,” said Sandhaus. Yet despite this endless stream of writing, it felt like I had missed my moment to be part of the design discourse. Ever so slowly, the excitement around deep dives into identity systems and behind-the-scenes process posts dried up. The writers who led the pack returned to practice—there was never much money in criticism, anyway—as the print magazines slowly fell away.

Open to undergraduate and graduate students across the United States. The AIGA Professional Design Certification represents a commitment to the design profession and to lifelong learning. This new online design certification program is open to design practitioners at every level who are committed to expanding their careers. The agency's trendy rebrand isn't the first time it has used design to spread its message.

As Twemlow said to me, putting design in its own section of the newspaper was always self-defeating in fostering design criticism. “This has been the problem all along,” she said, “to see design as this arcane, esoteric thing.” Graphic design criticism is, indeed, everywhere, just as graphic design is everywhere. We just might not recognize it as such because we don’t even recognize design. Sandhaus’s latest contribution to the field is The People’s Graphic Design Archive, a crowd-sourced virtual archive that aims to expand, diversify, and preserve graphic design history.

The training of my mentors changed the trajectory of my work, strengthening my conceptual thinking to allow me to bring writing as well as visual design into my practice. AIGA LA announces a partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Career Technical Education – Arts, Media & Entertainment (AME) program. Through this partnership, AIGA LA aims to work with LAUSD to inspire the next generation of designers and be a supportive resource for their students, programs, and teachers. The 2021 Design Point of View (POV) research initiative is an in-depth analysis of the design profession.

In this talk, Steph Hay shares how a global brand pioneered emotionally compelling AI design that impacted culture on a global scale. Read about experience design in our curated collection of articles. Join us for monthly webinars to inspire your best work, grow as a leader, and connect with designers across the world. Listen in on conversations about leadership, entrepreneurship, and creativity with leaders in the design space.

“The French magazine in the film obviously is not The New Yorker—but I was, I think, totally inspired by it,” said Anderson in a recent interview with the actual New Yorker. While even the characters of the film were based on New Yorker journalists and moments from the periodical’s storied history, the magazine in the film itself had to have a very distinct identity. For a fictional magazine that actually doesn’t even exist, The French Dispatch feels impossibly real. To create the publication, Anderson and co-producer Octavia Peissel brought designer Erica Dorn on board, who had previously worked with Anderson on Isle of Dogs, creating the graphics and props for the sets in close collaboration with Annie Atkins. “It was actually my first time working on a movie, but I think I did okay because I was asked to join The French Dispatch as the lead graphic designer a few months after the Isle of Dogs released,” says Dorn. This is the question writer Rick Poynor asked designer Michael Rock in the now-seminal dialog published in Eye Magazine in 1995, “What Is This Thing Called Graphic Design Criticism?

She has covered the intersection of design, culture, and business for publications including WIRED, Fast Company, Architectural Digest, and more. For Julie Zhuo, design is about creating an environment that empowers people to make connections and build community. To effectively empathize with the individuals you're designing for, abandon the notion of the “average user” and invest in research into the people you’re serving. This talk looks at the fundamental considerations needed for designing to become a part of people’s everyday lives. Like New York, I often hear people say of LA that everyone is from somewhere else.