Jean Zay, a Riviera town and a war that intervened.

The Festival de Cannes was planned years before it could be held. Wikipedia says its origins lie in 1938, when Jean Zay, France’s Minister of National Education, set up an international film festival at the suggestion of the official and historian Philippe Erlanger and the film journalist Robert Favre Le Bret. On 31 May 1939, it says, Cannes was chosen as host over Biarritz, and the town hall and the French government signed the festival’s founding document under the name Le Festival International du Film. Wikipedia puts the choice of Cannes down to its appeal as a resort on the French Riviera and to the town hall’s offer to raise its financial participation and build a dedicated venue.

The 1939 edition opened and stopped almost at once. Wikipedia says the opening gala took place on 31 August 1939 with a private screening of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and that the festival was postponed and then cancelled when the Second World War began in early September. The festival’s own history records that the palm already appeared that year on the festival regulations, beneath the coat of arms of the town of Cannes.

The festival returned after the war. Wikipedia says it was relaunched in 1946, from 20 September to 5 October, at the former Casino of Cannes. In 1947 it was held as the Festival du film de Cannes, and it was not held in 1948 or 1950 for budgetary reasons. An earlier Palais des Festivals was built for the 1949 edition on the seafront promenade of La Croisette, and in 1951 the festival moved to spring to avoid clashing with the Venice festival, held in the autumn. Wikipedia adds that the festival was formally accredited by the international producers’ federation FIAPF in 1951.

The present building came three decades later. Wikipedia says a new and much larger Palais des Festivals et des Congrès was built in 1983, while one parallel section stayed in the old building, and that in 1987 a red carpet was placed at the entrance of the Palais for the festival. The festival says its 50th-anniversary poster set a gold palm against the red used on the stairs.

A palm from the town’s arms becomes the festival’s mark.

The festival’s emblem comes from its host town. The Festival de Cannes, in a history article published on 25 March 2025 for the 70th anniversary of its palm prize, says the palm refers to the coat of arms and motto of Cannes, “Praemium palma victori”, which it translates as “the palm is the prize of the winner”. It links the motif to the legend of Saint Honorat, who is said to have climbed a palm tree while praying on the smallest of the Lérins islands in the bay, where an abbey now bears his name. The festival says the palm has been a fixture on its official documents since 1939, and its archive shows the Cannes coat of arms as a watermark on official notepaper in 1947.

In 1955 the festival turned the motif into an object. Wikipedia says the board invited several jewellers to submit designs for a palm in tribute to the town’s arms, and that the original design, by the Parisian jeweller Lucienne Lazon, was inspired by a sketch by Jean Cocteau, with the bevelled base of the stem forming a heart. The festival’s article says that from 1956 the prize came with an illustrated diploma featuring the palm, that Raymond Gide redrew it in 1957 for an album marking the festival’s tenth anniversary, and that a form close to today’s appeared on the official regulations in 1962. Wikipedia says the object was redesigned in hand-cut crystal by Thierry de Bourqueney in 1992, and that since 1997, when Caroline Scheufele redesigned it, it has been made by the Swiss jeweller Chopard, keeping the small heart at the base of the branch.

The palm moved onto posters and then into a fixed logo. The festival dates the palm’s prominent appearance on an official poster to 1960, in a design by Jean-Denis Maillart, and says it became a pin, a crown and a head jewel on the 1963 poster. In 1982, it says, the palm appeared inside its oval, in logo form, on the official poster. In 2002 the festival reinforced its visual identity with a charter for the palm symbol, still in force, which it says makes the festival’s image easier to identify around the world and ties together the initiatives it has created, among them the Marché du Film, Cinéma de Demain, the Village International and the Immersive Competition. Wikipedia says the festival officially adopted the name Festival de Cannes in the same year.

One emblem held still while the poster changes.

A music or film festival usually carries two identities at once. One is permanent: a name, a mark and a small set of colours or letterforms that stay the same from year to year and appear on the website, on signage at the site and on anything the organisers publish between editions. The other is annual: a poster, a key image or a short-lived graphic system made for a single edition and replaced when the next one is announced. The permanent mark has to sit comfortably beside each new poster without competing with it, so it is often simple, compact and reproduced in one colour, while the yearly artwork is free to change style, medium and mood entirely.

At the site itself the identity becomes practical. Wristbands and passes carry the name and the year, often in a colour that changes with each edition or ticket type so that staff can read them at a glance. Stages, screens and venues are given names that appear on maps, timetables and directional signs, and those names can outlast any single poster, becoming part of how regular visitors talk about the event. Wayfinding has to work in daylight and after dark, in crowds and at a distance, which pushes it towards large type and strong contrast. Merchandise, programmes and digital listings repeat the same elements in smaller sizes. For designers, the useful lesson is the split itself: a fixed core that builds recognition over many years, and an annual layer that gives each edition its own character and lets the event refresh itself without losing its name.

A new poster every May under the same palm.

The poster changes every year while the palm stays. The festival’s own guide to its official posters says illustrated posters were a long tradition, with artwork made for the event by A.M. Rodicq, Jean-Denis Maillart, Jouineau and Bourduge and Wojciech Siudmak; that a photograph, a view of the waves on the Croisette beach, was used in 1973; and that every poster since 2005 has been a photograph. It points to posters drawn by film directors, with artwork by Federico Fellini in 1982 and 1994 and by Akira Kurosawa in 1983, and says that since the 1990s the festival has often put film actors on its posters, beginning with Marlene Dietrich in 1992.

Recent posters carry the credit of the studio Hartland Villa. The festival credits it with the graphic design of the 2022 poster, built on Jim Carrey in The Truman Show. Euronews, in a piece by David Mouriquand published on 22 April 2025, reported that for its 78th edition the festival released a double official poster, a format it said it had not used before, with both images showing an embrace between Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant in Claude Lelouch’s 1966 film Un homme et une femme; the festival is quoted noting that the French word for embrace, “étreinte”, is an anagram of “éternité”. Sortir à Paris reported in April 2026 that the poster for the 79th edition, held from 12 to 23 May 2026, used a black-and-white set photograph by Roland Neveu of Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon in Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise, which had its world premiere at Cannes on 20 May 1991, with graphic design credited to Hartland Villa.

An association stands behind the poster and the palm. Wikipedia says the festival’s president is elected by the board of directors of the body officially named the French Association of the Film Festival, and represents the festival to partners, public authorities and the media, while the general delegate coordinates the events. It lists Thierry Frémaux as general delegate since 2007, and says Iris Knobloch was elected president in 2022, succeeding Pierre Lescure, who had held the post since 2014.

For a design guide, the Cannes Film Festival shows how one heraldic symbol can be held steady for decades — a palm taken from the town’s arms, set in an oval since 1982 and governed by a charter since 2002 — while the poster is allowed to change completely every May. Compare Berlinale, a film festival named after its home city, and Sundance Film Festival, which moved from yearly identities to a permanent frame in 2023. For this guide we use palm gold, Croisette red and Riviera navy with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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