Françoise Mouly

Françoise Mouly (0:01)

The best images develop in time. And in time, I mean in split seconds, so that at first you see the topic, you see what it's an image of, and then you get it.

Curtis Fox (0:19)

From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman.

On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, the conversation with art editor Françoise Mouly about her life and about her new book of covers from The New Yorker magazine.

Françoise Mouly (0:43)

My book is The Collection of Images, and it has a point. Print a Stead Long-Lift Print.

Debbie Millman (0:53)

Françoise Mouly has spent more than four decades expanding what images can do.

In 1980, she co-founded the groundbreaking comics magazine Raw with Art Spiegelman, which established comics as a form capable of extraordinary literary and visual depth. Since 1993, she has been the art director of The New Yorker, where she has overseen nearly 1,600 covers and helped shape one of the most recognizable visual identities in publishing. Her many honors include France's Order of Arts and Letters and The Legion of Honor, the Society of Illustrators' Richard Gangel Art Director Award, the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award, and induction into the Will Eisner Comic Awards Hall of Fame. Her newest book, The New Yorker, From Cover to Cover, looks across a century of the magazine's extraordinary cover art, and at the artists' ideas and decisions that have made those images endure. Françoise Mouly, welcome to Design Matters.

Françoise Mouly (2:01)

Thanks so much for having me, Debbie.

Debbie Millman (2:04)

Françoise, is it true that when you were growing up, you wanted to be Joan of Arc?

Françoise Mouly (2:09)

Well, in a broad sense. I mean, I wanted to choose a British out of France, yes, like many of my compatriots.

I don't remember saying this, but it does fit with... I grew up being like 13 in 1968 and lived through the takeover of Paris by the students. And I was really lucky because everybody else evacuated Paris, including my mother and sisters. But my father was a surgeon and stayed behind. And I lived through this city under siege with General de Gaulle, that actually arranged for tanks to cut off all entry or exit of any kind of food. I mean, it's medieval, but that's what happened. And my dad was excited, and we would go to the Cartier Latin. I remember restaurants that were there were cooking and serving everything they had because they cut off the electricity as well. So we were just feasting and going from like one Assemblee Generale.

It made revolution seem very attractive and generative and lively. That spontaneous generation, yes, was something I kept for a long time.

Debbie Millman (3:52)

At that time, you've described the streets where you lived filled with slogans, poetry, drawings, and flyers. And I'm wondering, what did that public language begin to ignite in you at that age, at 12 or 13?

Françoise Mouly (4:08)

Well, it was really a contrast with the Paris that I had grown up in, because the Paris I had grown up in was stultified and empty. I had no color and no posters, no nothing, no life. Everybody had evacuated. I lived in the equivalent of the upper east or west side with my parents. But arriving in the Gartier Latin was where you saw speech on all the walls and graffiti and publications and public speech.

And it was night and day from what I knew. I didn't even know anything about Paris. So what a way to discover it.

Debbie Millman (4:59)

Your father, as you mentioned, was a plastic surgeon. He was a very visible plastic surgeon, very pioneering. And you were one of three daughters. And your father decided that you would be the child that followed him into medicine.

And you said that when you were young, you first liked the idea. Before you began to question it, what did being chosen for that role mean to you?

Françoise Mouly (5:23)

Part of it had to do with autonomy and also the fact that the question was never in front of us as to what will we do when we grow up. Because it was still anchored in my mother's generation. What you do is that you get married and have children. That's all. So the idea that there was even a profession felt special. And I was receiving, in retrospect, decent education in the French lycée. I liked the fact that I was in an old girl lycée. It was segregated by gender.