Colorful New Wave: Nostalgia and cinema collide in the latest brand trend

Riding on the wave of 2025’s butter yellow obsession, Colorful New Wave design is set to make a distinctly French impact on graphic design and branding in the year to come. Already referenced by brands like Jacquemus, Guest in Residence, and Lipton, this nostalgic New Wave aesthetic balances European quirk with colorful minimalism for your most stylish designs yet (ooh la la, indeed).

A cinematic mood is sweeping graphic design. The Colorful New Wave trend lifts inspiration from iconic 1960s European films, bringing tongue-in-cheek sartorial style to branding and website design. A colorful take on modernist minimalism, this New Wave design trend transports your designs to a retro Riviera faster than Brigitte Bardot can sing “Moi je joue!”

Read on to immerse yourself in New Wave design and the enigmatic draw of French cinema style. It’s off-beat, sensual, and witty, providing the perfect form of aesthetic escapism for the months ahead. And if you’re looking for even more design inspiration, our latest 2025 graphic design trend report is well worth a look.

Inspired by the aesthetics of 1960s French New Wave cinema, the nostalgic, colorful New Wave design trend feels surprisingly fresh. Favored by fashion brands like Jacquemus and Guest in Residence for playful marketing campaigns, New Wave style uses bold color, minimal styling, and retro elements to create a sense of beauty and joie de vivre. We’re talking an optimistic New Wave color palette of butter yellow, cherry red, and sky blue, mixed with movie credit serif fonts and vintage photography styles, but always used in a way that feels contemporary and a little off-beat.

The delicious combination of New Wave typography, immediately nostalgic and cinematic, with clean modernist New Wave style, just hits different in 2025. It’s the perfect style to bring fashionable flair to designs, without taking itself too seriously. Effortless and drop-dead gorgeous? We’re here for it.

And it certainly seems like the Sixties are due for a comeback, with the movie industry leading the trend. The Fantastic Four: First Steps is set in a 1960s retrofuturist world, while the upcoming Netflix movie Nouvelle Vague, by acclaimed director Richard Linklater, sees Zoey Deutsch step into the shoes of the ultimate New Wave icon, Jean Seberg.

Originating in the 1950s and 1960s, New Wave Cinema was an exciting and eclectic European cinematic movement that rejected the style favored by ‘Old Hollywood’ cinema. Marked by a distinctly French flair for the experimental, expressive, and kooky, the New Wave aesthetic has a distinctive look. And it wasn’t restricted to film either—New Wave fashion style and New Wave art defined the beatnik style of the early 1960s, making an avant-garde departure from the buttoned-up styling of the 1950s.

For original New Wave design inspiration, look to Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963) for Brigitte Bardot, modernist architecture, and masterful use of color (swoon). Or watch the 2025 adaptation of Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness), based on the iconic French novel of the same name, for a contemporary take on New Wave aesthetics for the 21st century.

While the 1950s were a vision of Technicolor and conformity, the New Wave aesthetic reacted by presenting an alternative and freer way of life for young people of the time. It was European-centric, alternative, and achingly cool, visualized as a minimal, modernist dreamscape.

At the heart of New Wave design is its distinctive use of color. Unlike the muted tones of 1950s conformity, the movement embraced deliberate contrasts. Black and white often formed the backdrop, a nod to the minimalism of early French cinema, while accent colors were introduced sparingly to inject meaning or emotion. These weren’t random choices; a butter-yellow robe on Brigitte Bardot in Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963) or the sudden flash of powder blue on Anna Karina’s eyelids in Une Femme Est Une Femme (A Woman Is A Woman, 1961) served as visual punctuation marks in the story.

In today’s interpretation, the New Wave color palette has been dialed up to thrive in digital-first environments. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok demand visuals that grab attention instantly, so banana yellow, lipstick red, and sky blue act as irresistible focal points. Neutrals still provide balance, ensuring these bolder shades don’t overwhelm. Think of it as cinematic restraint meeting the dopamine-driven scroll of social media feeds.

New Wave visuals thrive in clean, airy compositions. Just as French New Wave directors used pared-back sets to focus attention on characters, designers today use white space to spotlight key elements. This isn’t minimalism for minimalism’s sake—it’s a functional choice that ensures bold colors and retro typography don’t get lost in visual clutter.

A minimalist New Wave layout often follows a grid, but it allows room for intentional disruption. For example, a centered block of text might be offset by a splash of yellow in the corner, or an asymmetrical photo crop that feels slightly rebellious. These layouts work particularly well for web design, portfolio sites, and even email campaigns where simplicity creates instant clarity, and the playful details become the hook.

New wave typography is where its playful side truly comes alive. Inspired by vintage French film posters and opening credits, typefaces often include exaggerated serifs, hand-drawn letterforms, or bold sans-serifs reminiscent of mid-century modernist design. The goal isn’t slick perfection—it’s character, nostalgia, and a touch of drama.

On digital platforms, New Wave typography often carries two functions: first, to convey a retro cinematic feel, and second, to serve as a visual anchor. For example, a headline styled in a condensed, high-contrast serif can instantly recall a 1960s movie poster, while a quirky script font layered over photography adds intimacy and personality. Combined with pops of color, the type becomes part of the storytelling rather than just a delivery system for words.

Photography in the New Wave style borrows directly from the aesthetics of 1960s film. Think grainy textures, sun-bleached tones, and candid compositions that feel spontaneous rather than staged. The Polaroid-style frame or subtle vignetting can help recreate the sense of looking at a film still frozen in time.

This cinematic approach translates beautifully to branding and social media. A fashion label, for example, might shoot lookbooks in natural light with imperfect shadows to capture authenticity. A café could use filters that mimic old film stock to make its Instagram feed feel more like a mood board than a polished advertisement. The power lies in the emotional pull: viewers aren’t just looking at a product, they’re being drawn into a world.

What truly separates the New Wave aesthetic from stricter modernist trends is its refusal to take itself too seriously. Directors of the era often threw in surreal, whimsical touches—jump cuts, exaggerated gestures, or playful fourth-wall breaks—to remind audiences that art could be fun. That same ethos drives the Colorful New Wave design approach.

For graphic designers, this might mean layering in unexpected collage elements, using quirky doodles alongside sleek photography, or adding an offbeat animation that feels almost absurd. A brand campaign could feature a floating croissant in neon hues or a distorted portrait that deliberately clashes with the otherwise minimalist layout. These moments of lighthearted surrealism give New Wave its signature charm and make it highly adaptable for playful, youth-driven campaigns.

Due to its enduring style, the impact of French New Wave cinema has never really been absent from branding and film. Directors like Wes Anderson have brought the whimsical aesthetic to contemporary audiences, and they have collaborated with French actress Léa Seydoux on distinctly New Wave-inspired fragrance campaigns for fashion brand Prada.

More recently, many brands have turned to the New Wave style for nostalgic marketing as a key campaign strategy. Let’s examine a few examples and see how these brands have reinterpreted New Wave design for 2025.

French fashion house Jacquemus has built a highly successful brand identity around the offbeat glamor of New Wave design. Citing the movie Le Mépris (Contempt) as providing the inspiration for starting his brand, head designer Simon Porte Jacquemus often makes a nod to the New Wave aesthetic in advertising, marketing, and fashion campaigns. Butter yellow branding, surreal campaign photography, and distinctive French quirk combine to create one of fashion’s most unique brand identities of recent years.

Another New Wave fashion style example is Gigi Hadid’s cashmere brand Guest in Residence, which is a great example of how a young brand can use vintage New Wave design to attract a Gen Z audience. The brand’s website and campaigns are a riot of bright pastel color, optimistic design, and vintage fonts, fusing all-American style with a kooky French aesthetic.

Vintage New Wave style is a natural fit for a brand built on analogue principles. Camera brand Polaroid leans into the undone aesthetic of French cinema to help craft its authentic campaigns for a modern anti-tech audience. Hand-drawn type, cinematic social videos and—unsurprisingly—polaroid images help build Polaroid’s vintage-tinted universe. A masterclass in how to make vintage branding a welcome antidote to the oversaturated digital era. 

While you might associate champagne with traditional luxury, historic champagne brand Veuve Clicquot makes a case for New Wave design as an ideal partner for high-end branding. The champagne house, with its distinctive yolk yellow palette, has recently collaborated with fellow Colorful New Wave enthusiast Jacquemus, creating cinematic social media campaigns and building more New Wave-coded elements into Veuve Clicquot’s brand identity, such as beach stripes, surreal supersized set pieces for events, and retro New Wave typography.

New Wave is the perfect aesthetic to turn to when you want to bring a touch of vintage style to projects, while still maintaining a cool and contemporary feel. It also embraces experimentalism, so as long as you make a few references to New Wave style in your design, you can have the freedom to be truly creative.

Here are some top tips for nailing the New Wave look in your own projects.

Polaroid frames, movie reel filters, or washed-out, grainy filters—the photos you choose can be edited to give them an aged effect, and consider cropping your images to mimic the smaller screen size that New Wave films would have been projected onto back in the early 1960s. 

Early New Wave cinema was mainly shot in black and white, and when color was used, it was highly intentional. In New Wave design, color can be symbolic, signaling hidden meaning or emotion, or used to draw attention to a particular feature of the shot, such as a costume or facial feature. In your own New Wave designs, try to use color in a simple, bold way, contrasting bright primary colors like sky blue and butter yellow with black and white or neutral tones. And keep the New Wave color palette French! Red, blue, white, and yellow feel in tune with a European aesthetic. 

There is no single ‘New Wave’ font. The genre’s typography is eclectic and experimental, from handwritten fonts that suggest a scriptwriter’s scrawl to modernist fonts reminiscent of the Beatnik era. In your own projects, you can gravitate towards vintage fonts, retro type, and fonts inspired by vintage movie credits. If they look great set against cinematic photography, you’re onto a winner.

New Wave cinema is beautiful to look at, with every still an immersive photograph in itself. Whether you’re working with video or photography in your design, try to approach the layout like a cinematographer. How can you draw focus to the ‘actor’ in the image? How can you frame, say, a website layout, to mimic the sensory beauty of a New Wave movie? Think about composition, angles, and framing until you achieve the perfect result. 

New Wave enthusiasts like Wes Anderson understand that the DNA of New Wave style lies in the quirk. Off-beat, witty, and surreal elements in your designs will make a playful nod to French cinema. For a modern touch, try incorporating 3D surreal elements or quirky illustrated graphics into a layout.

New Wave design has an enduring appeal for both cinema and design lovers. Here are some more tips and information about the New Wave to help you start creating your own vintage designs.

Ah, the eternal appeal of French style. Is there anything more aspirational in the history of design and fashion than French style? From the elusive and effortless ‘French girl beauty’ to the chic draw of Parisian cafes, France has always been held in high esteem by consumers from other countries, who gravitate to the country for its beauty, elegance, and romanticism. French design has never really gone out of style, and is associated particularly with high-end fashion and luxury products.  

Nostalgia marketing is a technique used by brands to connect with audiences on an emotional level, tapping into memories from their youth or the design styles of their parents’ youth. Nostalgic design looks back in order to create a cosy feeling of connection to a past time, and is usually used in reference to the later decades of the 20th century, such as 1970s and 1990s design, as well as the early part of the 21st century, which uses 2000s design and Y2K aesthetics to build nostalgic associations with a product or brand for a younger Gen Z audience.

The key to making vintage designs look right for right now is balancing old and new and offsetting vintage elements with contemporary touches. For example, grainy vintage photography looks great on a minimal website layout, while vintage fonts can look really fresh set in bright neon colors. You can also blend aspects of different vintage eras together, which can work really well and give your design a timeless aesthetic. Experiment and mix it up! 

Yes, you can! AI is an exceptionally useful tool for creating vintage-style images. By refining the details of your AI art prompts, including phrases like ‘faded lighting’, ‘vintage texture’, or 1960s aesthetic’, you can quickly generate images that pay tribute to nostalgic photography styles. Try creating vintage images on Envato’s ImageGen, and use this guide on AI prompts to achieve the best results.

Recreate the vintage image above on ImageGen using this prompt:

Vintage design and nostalgia marketing still wield considerable influence in contemporary branding, making a trend like Colorful New Wave a powerful ally for graphic designers looking to create compelling, emotionally-driven designs. Eternally stylish and emulated by a wide number of brands, French New Wave cinema is aspirational, beautiful, and achingly cool. ‘Le French, c’est chic!’

Vintage design is a salve to digitally saturated times, which perhaps explains why a vintage aesthetic like New Wave has found fresh fans in 2025. Delve into more vintage-inspired tutorials and inspiration, including the return of a folk-inspired kitsch aesthetic and how to use that other major design style of the 1960s, the Swiss Style, in your own designs.

Did you know that you can use AI to create vintage images and graphics? You can use Envato’s ImageGen and GraphicsGen to generate vintage-inspired imagery and video to use on a wide range of projects, from websites to social media, with just a few simple AI prompts.

Ready to start using AI elements in your marketing projects? Craft emotive AI videos for YouTube with VideoGen, beautiful soundtracks for creative content with MusicGen, and use creative AI prompts to get the best from your campaign imagery with ImageGen.