Of all contemporary directors, Wes Anderson might be the most well known to have a
signature typographic style. His association with Futura is almost a trope - you won't find
a Wes Anderson parody on the internet without the bold, geometric sans serif appearing throughout.
I think this observation, while true, is a bit stuck in his early career. Anderson has actually
evolved in his typographic flair throughout his filmography in some ways you wouldn't expect
so i wanted to take a deeper dive into how exactly he uses type and lettering in his films.
In this video we'll look at his early career we'll look at his early career, from Bottle Rocket
to the Royal Tenenbaums, in the second video we'll cover his mid career through the 2000s,
and in part three we'll cover his films up to the
upcoming The French Dispatch. So let's dive in, starting with Wes's debut feature film.
We begin, of course, with Futura. The very opening title is in Futura Bold, all caps, but let's put a
pin in that, because there's a lot to unpack about Futura and Anderson's affinity for it. But after
that, the type we see throughout this film is rather incidental - in the background - not doing
any storytelling in particular. There is a random assortment of typefaces;
certainly not the meticulous art direction we'll see in his future work. Perhaps the only time
attention is brought to letterforms of any kind is when we get a look into Owen Wilson's character,
Dignan's notebook, which - fun fact - is actually Wilson's own handwriting. [Oh wow!]
This first film itself has little deliberate production design to examine
(probably because it was done in a budget) but of some note are the posters. The typography
of these posters is very 1996 and very un-Wes Anderson. In this red version we have this strange
layered type effect for the title that looks a bit nickelodeon, and for the tagline we have the
extremely 90s choice of Matrix by Emigre Fonts, a pioneering digital type foundry that reached peak
cultural saturation from the mid-90s to mid-2000s. In the alternative poster we
have an even more jarring type choice with Serpentine, which has always had a pulpy,
action, sci-fi vibe. Consider the fact that this poster for a Wes Anderson film, uses the same font
as the posters for the Pierce Brosnan James Bond film "Tomorrow Never Dies" released a year later.
The cover for the Criterion Collection version,
of course, falls much more in line with the look we associate with Wes Anderson.
But honestly, much of that signature aesthetic wouldn't find it's expression until...
In his sophomore film, we see Futura return, but this time in a more starring role. Diegesis
in filmmaking terms, refers to the fictional world the characters inhabit.
The term crops up often when talking about sound.
Diegetic sound is something the characters are aware of, like a song playing on the radio.
Non-diegetic sounds would be music we hear in a montage, but the characters are not aware of.
In Rushmore, we get Wes Anderson's first use of non-diegetic typography - in Futura Bold,
all caps of course. Notably it is used in a montage of the protagonist, Max's extra-curricular
activities. But we will see this specific template - the montage with Futura overlaid in
alternating corners of the composition - become a recurring motif in future projects.
Unlike Bottle Rocket, the diegetic type in this film feels much more deliberately chosen to help
tell the story. We get the appropriately industrial-feeling, retro-futuristic Eurostile
for the Blume International logo. The sign for the stuffy private Rushmore Academy itself,
set in the cramped, old school Alternate Gothic contrasts with
public Grover Cleveland High School's Varsity style lettering. What I want to highlight here,
is that there is a broad palette of fonts in use to highlight the leading characters and settings.
Speaking of which, while the Futura montage might have burned its way into our cultural memory,
there is another kind of lettering that gets disproportionate screen time in Rushmore.
Calligraphy.
Our protagonist, Max, is established to be the Calligraphy Club President,
and this is something the art department on this film commit to 100%. We see his elegant Italic
hand script used on everything, from hand written signs, to the way his name is written at the top
of exam sheets, to his revenge notes down to the algebra on the blackboard in the opening sequence.
It's a wonderful detail, and a really fun aspect of the storytelling, especially through the
juxtaposition between Max's calligraphy and the childish scrawl of his would-be sidekick Dirk.
The calligraphy in the film was done by calligrapher Mark Van Stone who, apart from also
doing calligraphy for a Pirate of the Caribbean franchise, later became a leading expert in
Mayan Heiroglyphics. Now that's the kind of career diversity a man wouldn't mind. Speaking of which,
if you wouldn't mind giving that like button, it really does tell the algorithm good things
about me and helps me to grow the audience for this channel, which I greatly appreciate.
Looking at the promotional material for Rushmore, for reasons unknown, the marketing department
thought the best way to sell an indie coming of age comedy was to invoke soviet propaganda
poster design? And then this typeface - FF Blur - another trendy choice in the late 90s.
A lot of these early digital typefaces were just distorted or manipulated versions of other fonts,
scanned and badly re-vectorised. There's a reason we don't see much of them anymore,
but they certainly do evoke an era for those of us who were around back then.
Rushmore was Wes Anderson's breakthrough hit, but nobody knew that going into promoting the film.
Hereafter he would get even more meticulous about the details of art direction,
down to even the promotional materials, as we reach the next in our list...
If Anderson was relatively coy about his affection for Futura in his earlier films,
with Royal Tenembaums, Wes's font fanboyism reaches fever pitch.
By my count, this film has 80 individual shots featuring his favourite sans serif type.
So before we dig into the how and why, let's give some context and talk about what exactly Futura
is and what makes it such a significant typeface in 20th century graphic design.
Futura is typeface - or font family - designed in the geometric sans serif style. Sans serif meaning
without serifs, the small "feet" at the ends of strokes in typefaces like
Times New Roman or Garamond. Geometric because the letter-forms are constructed around
pure geometry - straight lines, triangles, squares and near-perfect circles.
It was designed by Paul Renner and released in 1927 by the Bauer Type Foundry in Germany. This
was contemporaneous with the Bauhaus School of Art, and the founding of the modernist
art movement. In design, the modernists sought to strip away the ornamentation
and subjective styling of the past and pair things back to only what was essential and functional.
Renner shared many of those modernist ideals, and Futura itself, while not as slavish to pure
geometry as say, Herbert Bayer's Unviversal, it did cast aside a lot of the quirks of earlier
sans serif designs of the Victorian era, known as grotesques. Those were developed for advertising,
and they were somewhat quirky, with organic forms born out of their roots in sign writing.
Futura and its ilk were a clean break from that, and because of that, they became the
bedrock of the New Typography movement in German and Swiss graphic design.
Futura was one of the most influential fonts of the twentieth century,
a huge commercial success not only in Europe, but America also. It was used by everyone from
NASA to Nike to Richard Nixon. If I'm still doing YouTube in 2027, for its 100th birthday,
I'll do a deep dive on Futura, which could easily fill an hour on its own.
In the meantime if you want to know more about its fascinating history, I highly recommend the book,
Never Use Futura, by Douglas Thomas.
But why does Wes Anderson fixate on Futura specifically?
Let's break down exactly how he uses it. In roman or bold, almost alwasy in all caps,
often widely tracked. This isn't how say, Barbara Kruger used Futura,
in tightly tracked bold italic on a red backplate. Or how Nike, or Volkwagen, or Supreme use it
(which is literally just Barbara Kruger again but stolen and capitalism is ironic now.)
Wes Anderson isn't nodding at any of those cultural references.
In Royal Tenembaums we see it used everywhere, both appropriately and not. Futura works for
a book cover, but it is a terrible choice for screen graphics for a sporting event.
The legibility is terrible and tone is too stiff. But Anderson isn't trying to accurately
recreate how Futura was used in the past. It's a deliberate, exaggerated style that gestures
towards a vague nostalgia for a non-specific time in the pre-digital 20th century.
His Futura nods towards Stanley Kubrick's Futura. Nasa's Futura. The Futura of museum
plaques and library cards. Thanks to it's ubiquity, when it comes to Futura,
no single brand, or public figure or product category overshadows all the
countless others who have used it. It belongs to simultaneously to everybody and to nobody.
Very few fonts have that characteristic. Helvetica, for as neutral as it might seem,
reeks of the corporate branding circa eighties to 2000s - American Airlines,
Target, Jeep or American Apparel. Gotham, another geometric sans serif, after Barack Obama's 2008
campaign has become intrinsically linked with politicians and government branding world wide.
If Bottle Rocket was relatively conventional in its visual story telling and Rushmore saw
Andersons' style shift, then Tenenbaums saw the full realisation his retro-modernist style.
Critics of Wes Anderson often complain that his movies feel constructed
and artificial. His fans would agree, they just don't see it as a bad thing.
Futura is really is perfectly typecast for this retro-modernism. What other
typeface could straddle so the many eclectic influences that Wes Anderson draws from?
The conspicuous use of Futura through this movie, along with other aspects of the heightened visual
stylization, draws attention to the fact that the story takes place in a world with rules unlike
our own. Despite the architectural hints, this is not the New York City we know from reality,
but a very specific view and interpretation of it.
Where Rushmore used the framework of a play, with curtains parting to open each act,
Tenenbaums uses that of a book divided by chapters. We also see several books about
or authored by various characters through the film, and this is typography is used very well
to evoke a time period. We have several instances of Helvetica from the 80s onwards, as well as the
ultra 70s Milano for the cover of Etheline's book, Family of Geniuses in the prologue.
This literary theme was even used for the promotional materials,
with the film poster in most regions using a book cover as the frame for the cast and title,
which of course is set in Futura.
Overall, the percentage of runtime which features Futura in some form or another is about
1/5th. Which, in a movie with an ensemble cast like this one, means that Futura actually has
more screen time than any of the lead actors. My favourite appearance has to be this cameo
from Futura Display, another less ubiquitous typeface by Paul Renner, quite unrelated to
the main Futura Family, but designed to be complimentary. I only wish that it had been
carried by Owen Wilson's character, which would have been more fitting given that relationship.
This film may have been the peak of Wes Anderson's love affair with Futura,
but it certainly wasn't the end of it. Please join me for future instalments in this series
when we'll look at how his typographic tastes evolved over time as his career progressed.
If you've enjoyed this video, then stick around for more videos about all things type,
logos and design.
As always, my name is Linus,
thank you kindly for watching and I hope I'll catch you in another video.