Inventive heroes: Annie Atkins
We tend to see the role of a graphic designer as someone who provides brands or identities for organizations, or maybe creates record sleeves, a magazine layout or posters. But watch a movie that has a newspaper, card, or even food packaging that was created by a graphic designer. While this work has always existed, our interest in the creative possibilities of this niche area of design has been awakened in recent years by a particular designer, Annie Atkins.
Dublin-based Atkins came into the spotlight after working on Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel in 2014 when she created a pastel-colored aesthetic that is still imitated and sought after to this day. Atkins continued to work on several other Anderson films, including Isle of Dogs in 2018 and The French Dispatch (hopefully) coming soon. In addition to Anderson, Atkins has also worked with Steven Spielberg several times, first on Bridge of Spies in 2015 and most recently on West Side Story, which is slated to be released later this year.
At the beginning of 2020, Atkins published fake love letters, fake telegrams and prison escape maps: designing graphic props for filmmaking, a book behind the scenes that deals with the extraordinary and careful arena of designing graphic objects for film.
As part of our 40th birthday edition, we spoke to Atkins about her career-defining moments in the past 40 years, and the timing couldn't be more appropriate. "I'm 40 this year, like Creative Review. I remember the magazine from my childhood because my father got it – he's also a graphic designer – so it was always part of my life," she says.
Above: picture created for the Criterion publication of the Grand Budapest Hotel; Movie tickets for Todd Haynes & # 39; Wonderstruck, 2017. Courtesy of Amazon Content Services LLC, photo by Flora Fricker
The 1980s
Atkins was a child in the 80s and both parents were designers and artists, which meant that their home was full of design books and great art books. “My father was working for a company called Hipgnosis, which designed record covers in the 1970s. It was actually in one of the books we had because they designed record covers for Pink Floyd, ”Atkins explains. "I loved going through all of these books, but I especially loved the book with my father because the 1970s record covers are so surreal."
For Atkins, these were real works of art, and she remembers her father, who said that plate design just isn't what it used to be. "It feels like plate design is now a lost art," she says. "I remember feeling like I really wanted to do something like that – I wanted to be a designer, but I also wanted to be an artist because I wanted to do strange things."