The 9 Best Graphic Designers & Creatives from France

At Shillington, we love to celebrate great design and share projects from creatives around the world. We’ve covered the work of many studios so far. Who’s up next? France! The lively City of Light is bustling with an abundance of art and culture to satiate your thirst for inspiration.

France is a popular destination drawing in visitors to Paris, the French Riviera and Alsace. For the foodie connoisseurs, the country is one of the biggest wine makers in the world and produces over 1200 varieties of cheese. And did you know the Tour de France has existed for more than 100 years? To recognise the amazing creative scene in France, we’ve selected 9 designs that we can’t get enough of—from floral cutouts to collage and custom typefaces.

1. Laura Normand

Laura Normand hails from Paris and her motto is the “play hard” attitude when it comes to her work. Her love for the avant-garde, the Memphis movement and Bauhaus seep into her visual aesthetic, creating work that is experimental and continuously explores new concepts. She’s worked on branding projects for beauty and fashion and her style consistently uses colourful florals, abstracted illustrations and cutouts—reminding us of a collision between Miro and Matisse.

For her shop Atelier Voilà, she creates handmade screen prints which you can purchase on Etsy. Some of the floral cutout style handmade prints were featured in a collaborative exhibition in La Recyclerie of Paris. For the Hortus Antiquum project featured here, she created a limited edition of 50 risograph prints for the Tambour Exhibition in Atelier d’Hauteville of Paris. The prints are available in various colour combinations and look like abstracted still life scenes.

2. Playground

Playground is a Paris and Amsterdam based multi-disciplinary studio founded by Valentin Adam. Their work is playful and fun, spanning design, print, motion graphics and illustration. For the studio, each project, no matter how serious, must be approached as a playground of ideas—creating work that exudes playfulness and excitement, which is central to their design style.

For the Biarritz en été! French music festival, the project was inspired by Sébastien Tellier lyrics, creating an identity that they call “hot, pop, colourful” and influenced by the Californian street poster aesthetic.

3. Aurore Laga

The Paris based designer Aurore Laga creates identity designs for restaurants, packaging and branding for clients in the arts, showing her experimental style using bold shapes and typographic treatments.

In the design for the book cover “Les Petites Reines” by Clémentine Beauvais, Aurore assembled a collage of shapes, flowers and birds to illustrate the concept of the story and rolled out the work into a series of posters for a theatrical adaptation.

4. Maïté Franchi

Maïté Franchi is an illustrator from Lyon, represented by the Folio agency, who has worked with an impressive list of clients including Adobe, Sony, Dior, Guerlain and Vanity Fair. Her largely vector-based stylized illustrations for editorials include cityscapes, fashion and food. Aside from her illustrative work, Maïté also explores other mediums and started a screen-printing workshop in her home. She believes it’s important to try out new techniques and to always stay curious.

5. Violaine et Jérémy

Violaine et Jérémy is an illustration and design studio from Paris founded by Jérémy Schneider and Violaine Orsoni, specialising in art direction, textile pattern design, identity, web and editorial design. Schneider explains their work as unique and timeless with a modern twist, inspired by the beauty of their city and influenced by the historical references.

They also run a type foundry VJ Type that designs custom fonts for their own design projects, adding their own creative twist with fonts that are strong and peculiar. For Mamie, the studio created illustrations, designed the identity and menus for the Parisian restaurant. The project included two custom fonts for the restaurants unique identity, evoking timeless old signage from France.

6. Yeaaah Studio!

The husband and wife duo Stéphane and Laura Casier run theSouth of France based Yeaaah Studio! creating a wide variety of comic-book style and vintage-inspired illustrations for clients, ranging from liquor brands to posters and magazines.

Their studio also sells apparel and accessories designed by Stéphane. The Japanese brand Hoppy Beverage commissioned him to design the Hoppy Art Land calendar with an illustration that reflected the mood of the brand and Japanese culture. In the work above, he dedicated the design to Kazuo Kamimura, the master of Gekiga.

7. M/M Paris

The M/M Paris agency was started 27 years ago by Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag focused on developing creative communications, designs and spatial strategies for brands. Their work is wide and varied, spanning poster art, branding, logo designs, films, interiors, art books, catalogs, editorials and fashion.

The studio led the creative direction for fashion publications like Vogue Paris, Arena Homme and Purple Fashion. Plus, fashion campaigns for big clients like A.P.C., Balenciaga, Blumarine, Givenchy, Narciso Rodriguez, Stella McCartney, Yohji Yamamoto and Yves Saint Laurent. You can really get a feel for their style in the creative direction for Bjork’s album Biophilia (2012), photographed by the great fashion masters Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, which won the best album packaging award.

8. Malika Favre

Malika Favre is a French artist currently based in London. Her illustrative iconic style is bold and minimal that reminds us of pop art using positive and negative space in clever ways. Her work appeared in publications like The New Yorker, Vogue, BAFTA, Sephora and Penguin Books. Fancy a print? You can purchase your favourites through her online shop.

The giclee print above is entitled ‘Petits Plaisirs’ and is very indicative of her style where the protagonist is sensual, evocative, strong—a femme fatale.

9. Les Graphiquants

Les Graphiquants was founded in 2008 in Paris and creates a variety of work for clients in fashion, galleries, performing arts and more. Their style merges the abstract and delicate, colourful and minimal through the use of  graphics, photography and video.

We just loved this stencil typeface ‘Alsace’ which has a very clean and contemporary style.

Feeling inspired? Check out our #ILoveTheseGuys series to discover more creative studios from around the world!

Interested in studying graphic design? Learn about the Shillington three months full-time or nine months part-time courses in London, Manchester, New York, Sydney, Brisbane or Melbourne.