Paris-based creative trio Diana Castro, Maëva Grande and Laure Guillaud of Annexe Studio turned the visual language of the weekly supermarket leaflet against itself in a limited newsprint publication that is equal parts seduction and disruption.
The supermarket leaflet is one of the most thoroughly ignored pieces of design in everyday life. Dropped through letterboxes, glanced at and discarded, it has its own visual grammar: the saturated colour, the bold price flash, the smiling fruit. Annexe Studio knows that grammar intimately, and F*** Your Supermarket uses it as a weapon.
Produced in 2022 as a newsprint-inspired edition limited to six copies, the publication was conceived by Diana Castro, Maëva Grande and Laure Guillaud as an exposure of the excesses of consumer society: misleading labels, harmful additives, GMOs and the subtle ways advertising shapes perception before we have thought to question it. The format mirrors its subject precisely, folded and scaled to echo the weekly advertising leaflets it parodies, so that the familiarity of the object does part of the work before a single page is turned. “Everyone is a consumer so everyone is involved,” as the studio puts it. The publication does not let its reader off the hook.
The visual references reach in two directions at once. On one side, the graphic codes of 1970s and 80s supermarket design: bold typography, aggressive colour, the cheerful authority of promotional print. On the other, aposematism, the natural phenomenon by which vivid colouration in the animal world signals danger. The tension between those two sources, between come-and-buy-me and stay-well-away, is precisely what the publication inhabits. Each page is designed to balance seduction and unease, drawing the eye with the same tools used to sell a product while undermining the transaction at every turn.
All photography, illustration and editorial work was produced in-house by the Annexe Studio team, with imagery shot in a Parisian grocery store. The result is a publication that looks entirely credible as the thing it is critiquing, which is, of course, the point. Irony and humour keep it from becoming a lecture. The design keeps it from becoming easy to dismiss.
Annexe Studio is an independent creative hub based in Paris, founded by Diana Castro, Maëva Grande and Laure Guillaud. The studio works across concept, image and environment, approaching each project as a space for quiet transformation and shared observation.
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F** Your Supermarket, Annexe Studio, 2022. Newsprint-inspired edition, limited to 6 copies. Photography and graphic design by Annexe Studio. Imagery shot on location in Paris.*
