Fast Co. Design recently brought our attention to the wonderfully detailed, hand-made graphic design elements in film director Wes Anderson’s latest movie, The Grand Budapest Hotel.
The film is set in a fictional European country, named Zubrowka, in the 1930s—to bring this setting to life, graphic designer Annie Atkins had to design “more or less every artifact in the movie bearing type or lettering”, including passports, signage and newspapers. What is even more astounding is that she did all this work by hand.
To achieve the vintage, not-new effect that is required, she used tried-and-tested traditional methods to create an aged look for her props—for instance, dipping paper in tea and blow-drying it.
The same attention to detail was also lavished on items that would not even be making a screen appearance, such as the insides of a notebook that one of the characters carried around with him—Anderson thought that it should have line pages instead of blank ones.
View more images of these lovingly hand-made props here—or read an interview that Creative Review did with Atkins here.
[via Fast Co. Design]