Evolving the French Press brand
The new French Press website has been out in the world for several weeks now, and the reviewers are raving! I sat down with the founders, Chris Walters and Andrew Juncker, to talk a bit about how the look and feel of both the site and the brand have evolved.
The new site design feels new and unique but also familiar, like Saul Bass and jazz album covers. What influenced you to go in this new direction for the brand?
Andrew: Peter Nowell and I drew our inspiration from mid-century poster designs — a time when print and ink work was starting to become more sophisticated. Techniques were being used to aim for something “perfect,” but it wasn’t quite there yet. So a lot of the design work that came out of that era had imperfections that later artists and designers ultimately embraced. We went to a print archive in SF and found hundreds of designs from that era, and of course we scoured the internet as well to find as much as we could. [Peter Nowell, the designer who worked with French Press on the new site and brand, has written about this process here.]
What do you think is the biggest change from your old brand identity to this new look and feel?
Andrew: The last brand felt like a template — this feels like an extension of our personality.
Chris: Yeah, shifting from a polished “corporate-friendly” website to something that reflects our culture and personality is the biggest change. The new website reflects the work we want to be doing and our own sensibilities.
The personality of French Press, to me, is irreverent without being alienating. I guess it’s like combination of AJ [Andrew] and myself where, yeah, we’re creative and weird, but we’re also professional and we take what we do seriously. We like to get our hands dirty and physically make things, which extends to our philosophy of preferring to meet in person and get shit done with everyone in the room as opposed to using a call or an email thread. With the redesign, we feel that our brand conveys that ethos.
Andrew: We’ve always liked incorporating physical elements in our videos that give un-repeatable organic-ness to our work. This is most obvious in the music videos and the more purely creative projects. We’ve created a lot of icons from actual paper cutouts — which is actually what the new logo came from. So, there are additional unique physical touches throughout.
Ultimately, a ton of time and work went into a site that we couldn’t just create from a template, and I hope that speaks volumes about our process and standards.
What’s your favorite part of the new website?
Chris: Peter did such an amazing job with the design and layout that you don’t even notice the little things — like the slight gradients and animations as you scroll through the pages. I love that it’s also purposefully imperfect and the shapes are irregular. The design reflects a handmade quality that we try to bring to all of our work.
Andrew: Yes — I too love the overall handmade quality of it. The fact that colors bleed, there are no straight lines, and the fonts are eclectic without being sloppy. I love the posters too, because of the creativity with the images and the symbolism in the posters of the actual project content.
Was it hard to decide to use the word “shit” on the front page of the website?
Andrew: Nope. It came up naturally in a conversation, just like “French Press.” We do swear, but it’s usually meant for levity, not shock value or to be aggressive. We have a sense of humor in our language — like using the phrase “OK, close this thing” instead of just an X to close a window. We don’t take ourselves too seriously, but we’re serious about the work, and the attention to detail.
Chris: I got push-back from some people who thought it was too aggressive. But we wanted something that made our visitors say, “Oh man!!” so that people would explore rather than just looking for a specific video.
Andrew: I personally find it irreverent without being snarky or arrogant. In contrast, we wouldn’t say, “French Press: We’re creative as fuck!”
