Q+A with Alex France

From web designer to coder to exhibition designer, Alex France is a shapeshifter.

Texas-born and raised, she moves between digital and physical realities as the graphic and digital media designer for the Anchorage Museum. An average day can consist of hovering 12 feet above the ground to install her latest graphic to sitting in the dark corner of her office creating in-house publications. Alex, who also created the cover illustration for this issue of 61°North, talked with us about her design style.

How did you know you wanted to be a graphic designer?

I sort of fell into it. I went to a high school that specialized in communications. They taught us Photoshop and building websites. For our last year, we had to pick a topic we wanted to study for the entire year and it was between design or mortuary science—because people never stop dying—and I ended up going into design because that was way less weird.

A lot of graphic designers start out as fine artists–drawing, painting, etc. Was this the same for you?

I'm terrible at art! I'm a terrible drawer and I'm a terrible painter. But, I like problem-solving, so that's where it does it for me.

How would you describe your design style?

The way I like to design is based off of this quote by Einstein, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." For example, if I can't describe what this project is with simple, graphic vocabulary then maybe I don't understand it well enough. And that's why I tend to go minimalist. But then, I also I tend to go for the warmth of texture. There's a sort of balance.  

What are the biggest influencers on your design style?

I'm from Texas–from San Antonio, just south of Austin. There's such a huge design hub there. So many independent, smaller designers are doing super incredible work that's very contemporary. There's this flat, minimalistic look that's been going on now with a kind of roughness and its own twang to it. Brad Woodard from Austin does the same rough, illustrative, minimalistic style. Lauren Dickens is another local amazing designer who used to work for the Helms workshop. Everybody in that shop is super talented. I follow all of them on Dribbble like a crazy little stalker. I draw a lot from these artists because I like to be on trend. These are the people who are masters of it.

You said you have an exhibition going on. Where can we see your work?

It's not my work, but I designed the exhibition at the Anchorage Museum. For the Camouflage exhibition, I did all the graphics for that–the projections, the signage, labels, prints on benches and interactives as well as the large text panels. There's a gallery that was wall-to-wall with huge 12-foot camouflaged panels filled with illustrations of different kinds of camo. We have a huge team that curates these exhibitions. They decide what goes into each gallery down to how high the painting has to be. When they finally decide on those parameters, we get this spatial budget and that's when I come in and start designing. I worked with the exhibition designer at the time. He would go, "Okay. Let's do illustrations x-big." And then I go in and fill in those voids. It's a back and forth between me and him. There's a lot on our end because we take it through to the final production.

When you're in a rut and can't think of any ideas, what do you do to get out of it?

I just try to get out of myself. One of my go-to steps is research. I'll do a little sketching. And then I reach this point where I think maybe this isn't the path I should take for this project because there's no clear plan of attack. A lot of the times, by necessity, we're always in front of our computers. I kind of get stuck in that and just need to get away from the computer.  That's why I came to Alaska because I kind of saw that in my work. Not that I've been producing some bad work, but they all looked very similar. I thought maybe I needed a change in environment–something fresh, something different, some different design I've never done before. I was primarily a web designer. All I did was web design and front-end coding.

If you can carry on any graphic design project in Alaska what would it be?

I would love to do a humorous visitors' guide to Alaska. We talked about it in one of our AIGA meetings. It'd be a pro-bono kind of joke, filled with funny cartoons and illustrations. There would be a whole section on "Stop going into the mud flats!" and another section called "Quit feeding moose!"

This article was first published in 61°North – The Design Issue. Contact the editor, Jamie Gonzales, at jgonzales@alaskadispatch.com.