Inventing Anna (Netflix)
Job Title: Graphic Designer
Lead Graphic Designers: Dustin Neiderman, Keith Endow, Eric Bryant
Production Designer: Henry Dunn
Art Directors: Carmen Cardenas, Molly Mikula
Inventing Anna was my first full-time job as a union graphic designer for television. Production ran from August 2019 to December 2020, with a big ol’ pandemic gap. The scope of this show was enormous, from creating a branding a full magazine office to managing several years of iconic Instagram posts and photos. Given the virality of Anna Delvey’s story, we had a lot of research to work from and did our best to match and reference the real elements of the story as much as possible.
Probably the biggest project we tackled for the show was creating the entire headquarters and offices for Manhattan Magazine, a fictional publication to replace New York Magazine. The company logo was created by Dustin Neiderman and we put it on everything: magazines, binders, paperwork, id badges, cubicle nameplates, desktop screensavers, general office signage, and more. We even established branding for the fictional off-shoot publications, such as “Scavenger” and “The Stylista.” One of my tasks at the start of production was to create an entire magazine layout complete with fictional articles and advertisements that could be legally cleared for use. This was dressed into the back of the office create a faux “work-in-progress” layout board.
I also got to recreate an alternate version of the real article that was written by Jessica Pressler and published in New York Magazine. We had an additional graphic designer, Avery Sorrels, come in to help take photos of our lead actor to match some of Anna’s most iconic looks. She did an outstanding job capturing the article’s cover photo - the resemblance is uncanny!
recreated with stock imagery and original illustration
above, fake ad made from stock
Some screenshots:
Since social media was such an integral part to the story, we also invested a lot of time into establishing Anna’s social media presence. This had to be created and maintained in both digital and physical formats to tell the story. We also had to coordinate with the writing & production teams to ensure we had not only the necessary photo assets but also captions and engagement metrics where appropriate.
A mock-up to help plan and scale the “Beautiful Mind Board” that Vivian builds in her apartment from Anna’s Instagram posts
Photo composites
Instagram Format Mockups
More to come…