I can guess what the orig­i­nal inten­tion for the poster for Czech movie Emp­ties (Vratné Lahve) must’ve been. The movie title in Futura Con­densed was to look as if it was painted onto the hot air bal­loon, but let’s say it didn’t work out like it was sup­posed to. Fur­ther­more the poster suf­fers from horror vacui, with the three main ele­ments in the design awk­wardly fill­ing up every bit of space.





To claim that Hol­ly­wood likes remakes and re-​imaginings is a slight under­state­ment, and it occurred to me lately this applies to the posters for the movies as well. We recently had the almost lit­eral copy of the The Skele­ton Key poster for The Return, and now there’s the poster for Shut­ter rip­ping off the con­cept for 2007’s Hal­loween, which itself already was a copy of 13 Ghosts. Which was a lousy poster to begin with.

I must say though that I’m pleased they used Hoe­fler & Frere-​Jones’ clas­sic Jenson dig­i­ti­za­tion Requiem instead of the inescapable Trajan.



On a sim­i­lar note the poster for Then She Found Me cor­rob­o­rates my theory that Hol­ly­wood keeps rehash­ing cer­tain con­cepts. Last year I noticed this trend of alter­nat­ing hor­i­zon­tal bands of white and pic­tures, with either a Bodoni- or Didot-type face in red or black for roman­tic come­dies, and here’s yet another one. Fair enough, in this case it’s olive green and red, and the movie title is set in Cen­tury School­book, but you catch my drift. By the way, I think they should rein in all those mad Pho­to­shop­pers work­ing in the adver­tis­ing indus­try. Really, Bette Midler looks like she escaped straight out of Madame Tussaud’s. Creepy…



And while we’re on the sub­ject of remakes, re-​maginings, copies, rip-​offs and what­not, I’ll throw in this last exam­ple. The design indus­try sure is get­ting a lot of mileage out of Corey Holms sem­i­nal logo designed for Frank­furt Balkind for the tele­vi­sion series The Sopra­nos. The iconic sub­sti­tu­tion of a pistol for the ‘r’ has become engrained in the col­lec­tive con­scious­ness and who knows how many times it has been par­o­died and copied (see for exam­ple my com­ments on the poster for Triad Elec­tion).

In the orig­i­nal Sopra­nos logo the gun shape is care­fully bal­anced and per­fectly com­ple­ments the char­ac­ter shapes of Com­pacta. On the poster for My Mom’s New Boyfriend it sticks out like a sore thumb, break­ing up the movie title in a very clumsy way as it is com­pletely mis­cast against Hel­vetica. Although upon closer inspec­tion you notice the poster which car­ries the work­ing title Home­land Secu­rity fea­tures Hel­vetica indeed, but for some inex­plic­a­ble reason the final poster uses Geneva.

As for the image… Well, I’m all for sen­sual imagery and don’t mind cleav­age, but this image strikes me as gra­tu­itous, not of very good taste and sug­ges­tive in an inap­pro­pri­ate way. Nope, this poster really is no good.



Of much better taste are the poetic posters for French movie Deux jours à tuer. The theme of the movie – the explo­ration of an event that causes the pro­tag­o­nist to give up his wife, chil­dren, friends, house and money – is beau­ti­fully trans­lated into these quiet images. As for the type, granted, the choice of Hel­vetica is not very inven­tive, but movie tile, actors’ names and cred­its are thought­fully laid out on the page.



The illus­tra­tive qual­ity and tex­ture of the poster for Estômago some­how reminds me of the work of Dave McKean, one of my favourite comic book artists (he’s much more than that of course, but I learned to know his art through Vio­lent Cases, Black Orchid and the stun­ning Arkham Asylum: A Seri­ous House on Seri­ous Earth). One might think the movie title is hand let­tered, but the iden­ti­cal repeat­ing char­ac­ters in the taglines reveal it is in fact a font – Kid Type Crayon, which is part of the Kid Type 1 pack­age.





The movie title on the poster for Night­watch­ing on the other hand really is ren­dered in cal­lig­ra­phy, not a font. This makes it inter­est­ing to exam­ine which solu­tions are used for local­ized ver­sions. The Russ­ian poster for­sakes the rough edges of the orig­i­nal for the cal­li­graphic energy found in Zapfino, while the Span­ish ver­sion favours the sim­i­lar tex­ture of Aquiline. Only the Tai­wanese poster resorts to gen­uine cal­lig­ra­phy, and although the script is com­pletely dif­fer­ent the over­all impres­sion is the most faith­ful to the orig­i­nal.



While it may not be the most orig­i­nal design, the poster for Kung Fu Panda simply oozes joy­ful­ness. Po’s heroic pose and the clas­sic sun ray motif are wit­tily offset against the mis­chie­vous smirk on the panda’s face. The 3D treat­ment of the movie title mimics the typ­i­cal graphic style of clas­sic mar­tial arts movies.



It is dis­heart­en­ing to see how the movie indus­try mar­kets its movies in such a stereo­typ­i­cal way. The poster for St Trinian’s is an unfor­tu­nate exam­ple of teen-​oriented design, with it’s magenta and black graph­ics tagged onto a bizarre Pho­to­shop assem­blage of the movie’s main actors. It all looks very arti­fi­cial and out of synch. The movie logo in faux graf­fiti uses the equally arti­fi­cial look­ing faux black­let­ter Black­moor, one of David Quay’s 80s aber­ra­tions.



While the movie title on the poster for French biopic Sagan is quite con­ven­tional – FF DIN must be one of the most widely used sans serifs these days – the design is less so. By low­er­ing the movie title to the hori­zon, about halfway the height, and stack­ing the rest of the type on top of it, the sky cre­ates a sense of open­ness which makes the poster breathe. The non­cha­lant pose of the actress against the con­vert­ible sports car rein­forces the relaxed atmos­phere.



This is about as schiz­o­phrenic as it gets. When com­par­ing these two posters for Leather­heads it appears as if the mar­ket­ing people couldn’t decide whether this movie should be adver­tized as a roman­tic comedy or a screw­ball sports movie. In the ver­sion on the left George Clooney’s head some­how looks too big and out of place due to incon­gruities in the light­ing. Plus a bit more atten­tion could’ve been paid to the typog­ra­phy. Lazily slant­ing some Kabel is not very inter­est­ing nor appro­pri­ate when trying to evoke the clas­sic 1950s movies. The type on the right is better suited: Hoe­fler & Frere-​Jones’ Knock­out No. 71 Full Mid­dleweight, a design inspired by Amer­i­can wood­types of the late nine­teenth cen­tury. Another gor­geous exam­ple of that style is Rhode by David Berlow.



What makes the adver­tis­ing for The Dark Knight so suc­cess­ful is not so much the poster – although it is quite beau­ti­ful and very effec­tive in con­vey­ing the sense of menace and chaos – but the impres­sive viral cam­paign around it. Exam­in­ing this cam­paign would lead us too far, but I’d like to show some of the teaser images that pre­ceded the actual posters and some alter­nate posters. By the way, all type is set in Franklin Gothic (except for the hand writ­ten stuff of course).



One of the most suc­cess­ful teaser images is this styl­ized Joker face, com­bin­ing his typ­i­cal eye make-​up with the Batman symbol as a mouth. Very clever in show­ing how the sworn ene­mies are in fact both sides of the same coin.









During the cam­paign the orig­i­nal posters were at some point replaced with iden­ti­cal ver­sions which had scrib­bles all over, as if the Joker and his cronies had been going around over­writ­ing them.



This gor­geous multi-​layered image has Batman’s por­trait com­posed of a mul­ti­tude of Joker cards. The little bits of tape, the blood, the scrib­bles, the scalpel all add to the creepi­ness of the poster.



But it all pales com­pared to this dis­turb­ing image of the Joker stand­ing behind a steamed-​up window and paint­ing a bloody smile on it. Bril­liant.



When it comes to sug­gest­ing South East Asian script I think the poster for Hotel Very Wel­come is spot on. Instead of slav­ishly trying to recre­ate the exact char­ac­ter shapes – which never works out quite well – they went for a sim­i­lar­ity in struc­ture with crude sans serif let­ters that look like they were cut out in paper. Com­bined with the brown pos­ter­ized images on the tex­tured back­ground in warm ochre and orange tones this results in a very nice and con­vinc­ing poster.



The image on the poster for Secret Sun­shine (Milyang) superbly trans­lates the feel­ing of loss and alien­ation embod­ied by the film. The movie title is set in Scriptina, a hor­ri­bly spaced and kerned free script which I was forced to use recently for a trade fair cat­a­logue. Not only does Scriptina set quite poorly, it also doesn’t have any alter­nate glyphs, which means the exag­ger­ated swashes on some low­er­case char­ac­ters mess up the set­ting time and again.



Hey, the early nineties are back in full force. The poster for X-Files - I Want To Believe – the second movie adap­ta­tion of the 90s cult tele­vi­sion series – uses the orig­i­nal series’ sig­na­ture type­face Indus­tria – another 90s icon. The poster itself is a tad ridicu­lous, as the macro shot of the snow tex­ture makes it appear as if Mulder and Scully are really really tiny.