Time sure flies when you’re having fun, and prepa­ra­tions for my trip to San Fran­cisco didn’t help. We’re past due for this episode of Screen­Fonts. As usual I take a look at the posters of movies cur­rently being released in the USA, both wide and lim­ited. My main focus is the type used on those posters, yet that doesn’t stop me from voic­ing my opin­ion on the over­all design. When there’s noth­ing inter­est­ing to tell about spe­cific posters I will simply gloss them over. Life’s tough. ;)

The posters below are from the second half of September.

I’m not sure how I man­aged to miss the poster for Flow last episode, but I think it’s a bril­liant in its sim­plic­ity. It does fit in the recent trend of having hand drawn posters for indie movies, but it is a very effi­cient one. The flat cyan back­ground makes the black and white graphic pop out. I like it when a designer gets the mes­sage across in such a simple and straight­for­ward way – the draw­ing itself is easy to under­stand and per­fectly trans­lates the theme of the movie. The hand drawn out­line type also is very well exe­cuted. Reduc­ing the 3D movie title to its shadow is a nice touch, fur­ther sim­pli­fy­ing the design and let­ting the draw­ing of the tap being the centre of atten­tion. People who want to achieve a sim­i­lar hand drawn sans serif look have quite a few dig­i­tal fonts at their dis­posal, including:

• Anal­fa­beto by Flavio Morais
• Anarko by Peter Bruhn
• Block­head by John Hersey
• FF Bokka by John Critch­ley & Darren Raven
• FF Folk by Mau­r­izio Osti & Jane Patterson
• FF Iodine by Stephan Müller
• Futu­ra­mano by Gert Wiescher
• FF Kosmik by Erik van Blokland
• FF Kurt by Vivien Palloks
• FF Let­ter­ine & FF Matto Sans by Alessio Leonardi
• FF Prater 1 & 2 by Stef­fen Sauerteig & Hen­ning Wagenbreth
• FF Scrib­ble by Ole Schäfer
• FF Steel by Fab­rizio Schiavi

And if you’re look­ing for dig­i­tal fonts that emu­late hand drawn serif faces, Stephen Coles once com­piled an impres­sive list on Typographica.

The poster for Mir­a­cle at St. Anna shows some inter­est­ing image crop­ping. The arm with the U.S. Army 92nd Infantry Divi­sion mil­i­tary patch (Buf­falo Sol­diers) is just enough infor­ma­tion to sit­u­ate the action in the Second World War, and the pro­tect­ing arm wrapped around the Ital­ian boy “tells” the rest of the story. The square sans looks close to Gagarin, but the rounded cor­ners look less rounded so I’m not sure what this type­face is. The subtle ref­er­ence made by the crosses in the “A”s is a very nice touch.

The Amaz­ing Truth About Queen Raquela has a very joyous poster. The jux­ta­po­si­tion of uri­nals with the royal colour purple – refer­ring to the “Queen” in the movie title – cre­ates a sur­pris­ing ten­sion. The uri­nals them­selves are a not so subtle – but alto­gether quite funny – hint that the woman sit­ting on one of them actu­ally is a trans­sex­ual. I’m less enthu­si­as­tic about the type. Optima has never done it for me – I have gone on record that I don’t much care for Her­mann Zapf’s trade­mark curves and design details. Plus I would’ve pre­ferred a more regal type­face, some­thing like Akira Kobayashi’s FF Clif­ford or FF Acan­thus (it’s no coin­ci­dence I picked Kobayashi as an exam­ple ;). Also the hand writ­ten tag on the bath­room tiles is not very con­vinc­ing. In my opin­ion there are better fonts that sim­u­late fast all caps tag-​like writ­ing, like Andy, ITC Berranger Hand, MVB Dinkscratch, FF Fan­cy­writ­ing, Flood, Jakob, FF Market, FF Soup­bone, Squickt, or even FF Erikrighthand.

I was intrigued by the geo­met­ric sans on the poster for Nights in Rodan­the – which isn’t worth men­tion­ing for the rest. The angled finial of the leg on the R made me think it might either be Bern­hard Gothic or Kabel (either the orig­i­nal ATF Kabel or the ITC ver­sion). It def­i­nitely is not ITC Avant Garde Gothic, although the G seemed more close. Now, I always like a good chal­lenge, so I dove into my ref­er­ence books – actu­ally Jeff’s as I’m work­ing in the San Fan­cisco offices this week – and man­aged to pin it down. It is Litera, a lesser known sib­ling of the afore­men­tioned geo­met­ric sans faces. The type­face shares its large x-height with ITC Avant Garde Gothic but throws some Art Deco flair into the mix.

Though the teaser poster of Blind­ness does remind me of the bril­liant teaser poster for The Dark Knight, it is a per­fect design in its own right. The blind­ness in the title is sug­gested by the frosted glass which makes the figure on the poster dis­ap­pear, and the set­ting of the movie title refers to the eye test at the occulist’s. The main poster seen at the top left is a more main­stream affair with Julianne Moore lit­er­ally lead­ing the blind. How­ever the fading let­ters of the movie title – set in Neue Hel­vetica Extended – are a nice touch. The alter­nate poster at the top right has a better image. Having the hands of the blind explore Julianne Moore’s face with their hands is a beau­ti­ful metaphore for the theme of the movie. I’m just not entirely con­vinced about the alter­nated in and out of focus Franklin Gothic used here.

Choke has a rather text-​heavy poster. The design in red and black fea­tures an arrest­ing cut-​out pro­file of the pro­tag­o­nist chok­ing on a woman whose legs are still stick­ing out of his mouth; a slightly dis­turb­ing image. The poster is suc­cess­ful, but the choice of the type­face under­mines its power. Myriad doesn’t stack very well and its char­ac­ter shapes are too human­ist for this con­struc­tivist set­ting. I would’ve gone for a squarer design, or at least one with super­el­lipse (or squir­cle – love that word!) curves.

I don’t exactly know why I like the poster for Hum­boldt County, but I simply do. I have never in my life smoked nor done any drugs (even coffee is too strong for me – I know, I’m an embar­rass­ment to all the other rock drum­mers out there). So it’s a bit weird that the image of that reg­u­lar Joe – all relaxed – stand­ing on one mother of a gigan­tic spliff and over­look­ing an idyl­lic forest has such a sooth­ing effect on me. The movie title in Colonna – a dig­i­ti­za­tion of a clas­sic Mono­type serif inline titling face – is thought­fully set, with the cap­i­tal C touch­ing the base­line of Hum­boldt at just the right spot. The human­ist sans used for the bylines is Robert Slim­bach’s Cronos, an unof­fi­cial adap­ta­tion of Today Sans.

As far as posters for his­tor­i­cal movies go, this one for The Duchess is appro­pri­ate and works well. It is a nice exam­ple of a nar­ra­tive poster, with the facial expres­sion of the actors and their posi­tion subtly hint­ing at the sto­ry­line of the movie – a quick search con­firmed that this is about rela­tion­ships. The mono­chrome image qual­ity acts as a har­mo­niz­ing ele­ment for the image, and thank good­ness the clas­sic cap­i­tals are not the dreaded Trajan. Alas I some­how can’t find what it actu­ally is. At first I thought it could be Felix Titling or Per­petua Titling or some­thing along those lines, but no.
:: U P D A T E ::
You can always rely on the Typophile Type Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion Board team. I had barely pub­lished this post and they already had iden­ti­fied the clas­sic serif caps as Shàngó Gothic.

Another nar­ra­tive design is the poster for Ghost Town. Of course this one greatly ben­e­fits from the bril­liant “acting” of Ricky Ger­vais – as most of you may know cur­rently one of my favourite British actors. The look on his face speaks vol­umes, and you imme­di­ately grasp that (a) this is a comedy about ghosts, (b) Ricky is being harassed by them, and (c) he is not happy. Actu­ally, the title may be a give-​away regard­ing (a)… All type is set in very­tight­ly­tracked Futura and I don’t want to com­ment on that.

Obvi­ously I can’t say much about the type on the poster for Igor. It is not even type but custom designed let­ters com­posed of loose parts, just like the Frankenstein-​like mon­ster in the poster. Quite funny and well done (I guess assem­bling the char­ac­ters from actual body parts might’ve been taking the anal­ogy a tad too far :P). The rest is Gill Sans Ultra Bold and Ultra Bold Con­densed a.k.a. Gill Kayo as is cus­tom­ary on posters for comedies.

That’s it for this episode – till next time! :)

Tags: film, lettering, movie posters