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Characters On The Silver Screen | January 2008

Clever integration of type in an image always does it for me. You know, not just slamming the movie title on top of the poster, but analyzing the whole image area and finding a way to organically graft the type onto it. A fine example of such integration is the poster for French movie La Clef, where the movie title and baseline in grunged up Clarendon are constrained by the shape of the white shirt. French movie posters are always hit and miss with me, but this one goes in the hit section.

In case the poster for The Return looks familiar to you… well, it does.

The vampire movie 30 Days of Night is an adaptation of the successful comic book franchise published by Ideas + Design Works. The comic book series written by Steven Niles and illustrated by Ben Templesmith features cover paintings by the inimitable Ashley Wood, heir to comic legend Bill Sienkiewicz.

When looking at the movie poster it strikes me as rather pedestrian and not very imaginative, a bit muddy and too busy. However, the expressive vampire head in the lower right corner is a fragment of the far more striking teaser poster, which in its turn spawned a series of related images. Black almost-silhouettes of howling vampires are rendered in splattered ink on a ruthless red background.

Although those teaser images are far more efficient than the main poster, their superficial brutality pales in comparison to the blood-curling down-played horror of the original comic book cover. It’s all in the details, baby. Nothing beats the real thing.

The newly added House Industries type foundry carries a number of similar scrawly, scratchy scripts. A more lyrical take on this script style is the late Frank Heine’s classic Motion.

The only reason I’m showing this poster for Cabale à Kaboul is because I wanted to point out the type used. Solstice is one of the very best early releases from T-26, and it works wonderfully well in a Middle-Eastern context.

Nice moody asymmetrical poster for Into The Wild, yet once again it is a shame for Helvetica, the Official Typeface for Potential Award Winners® at Independent Movie Festivals™. The thinking man’s Trajan as it were.

Rendition uses a rather conventional interpretation of the narrative poster divided in horizontal bands. This time the typeface is not Helvetica but a wide variant of Basic Commercial.

I’m not much of a nostalgia buff, but I must say the Saul Bass inspired variant posters for Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead are spot on. The rough cut-out letters which compose the cat-like silhouette of a sitting devil match the noir mood of the movie perfectly. The again, you can hardly go wrong referencing possibly the best movie poster and credits sequence designer ever. Having the words switch from black/white to red and back again is a simple yet effective device for improving the readability of the movie title.

Another deceptively simple yet strong design is the poster for La Sconosciuta. The clair-obscur portrait and the DIN 1451 Engschrift movie title are combined in a thoughtful, no-frills composition. For an improved, extended and fully-featured version of the typeface check the insanely popular FF DIN.

The posters for No Country For Old Men translate very well the mood of the movie into print. Apart from the weathered Helvetica Inserat (or something similar – I can’t be bothered to check it) Clarendon roars its chunky serifs on the posters. The subdued colour scheme is wonderful, and for once I can stomach the use of gradients in a movie title.

Ang Lee’s Lust Caution sports a classy, almost monochrome brownish Art Deco-inspired poster. The whole movie is distilled to one intense look, and you can almost taste the energy spark(l)ing between both protagonists. The type set in some geometric display sans is very nicely integrated into the pattern made by the shadows on the wall.

14.04.2008 - 11.55.49

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