Jean Widmer, Designer of Celebrated French Graphics, Dies at 96

[mahatmakanejeeves]

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S. Pierron/Centre Pompidou

Jean Widmer, Designer of Celebrated French Graphics, Dies at 96

His minimalist road signs became a visual hallmark of France’s highways. He also created logos for cultural institutions like the Pompidou Center.

By Adam Nossiter
Feb. 26, 2026

Jean Widmer, a French-Swiss graphic artist whose simple, streamlined designs affixed the images of France’s major buildings and monuments, through logos and road signs, in the minds of generations of his compatriots, died on Feb. 2 in Paris. He was 96.

His death was announced by the Pompidou Center, the Paris museum of modern arts, which noted in a statement that Mr. Widmer had “made a lasting mark on the history of design by his sense of minimalism” and “his typographical rigor.”

Those elements were combined in his most famous design, the Pompidou Center’s logo: five thick, black horizontal lines cut across by two wavy parallel diagonals. The logo is a representation of the building, with its exterior escalators, radically simplified — “pure reduction,” the museum called it in a 2020 interview with Mr. Widmer.

In 1977, he sketched his concept on the corner of a paper tablecloth at a cafe across from the Pompidou, which was then under construction at the edge of the Marais, the oldest part of the city.


The logo that Jean Widmer created for the Pompidou Center in 1977 was an abstraction of the building’s exterior. “It was the fastest logo I ever created,” he said. “It was already in my head.” Jean Widmer

“It was the fastest logo I ever created,” he said. “It was already in my head.”

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In the early 1970s, Mr. Widmer created a system of hieroglyphic-like pictographs to help French motorists find notable destinations nearby. Jean Widmer

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A poster Mr. Widmer designed in 1975 for an exhibition at the Center for Industrial Creation in Paris. He was known for his restraint, Paula Scher of Pentagram said: “He was never over the top.” Jean Widmer

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Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans and is now a writer on the Obituaries desk.

[NNadir]

1. When my grandmother died at 89, her sisters gathered around the coffin and said...

Last edited Fri Feb 27, 2026, 12:20 PM - Edit history (1)

..."She was so young."

It isn't polite to laugh at a wake, particularly at one's elders, so I suppressed my reaction.

To have lived to 96 and to have left, in this case literally a mark on the world is an honorable thing. It was a life well lived.