Movie poster typography7/24/2023 ![]() The poster of West Side Story, on the other hand, does include two tiny dancing silhouettes and the shape of a fire escape, but that is about it for figuration. The poster makes its point: “this is a story about show business, its tragedy, and its joy.” It achieves that without a single image in it. The tagline appears in a rounded sans serif type, and the message is compelling. In shiny white against a simple black background, the movie’s title is written in a font that evokes marquee lights. The poster does an incredible job at creating the sense of an epic story without wasting resources at all. That is why it shouldn’t surprise us that one of the oldest, and the newest examples I could find of typographic posters for movies, both belong to musical films: All That Jazz (1979) and West Side Story (1961 & 2021), all have posters that heavily rely on typography to make their point.Īll That Jazz is a semi-autobiographical musical film about the life of the legendary choreographer and director Bob Fosse, and it was directed by the legend himself. The trend of typographic posters has always been more common in Broadway billboards than in cinemas (probably because in theater, the cast of a play can vary all the time, so designers focus the branding design in the story more than on particular faces). Since the ’80s, movies from all genres have been advertised this way, so let’s see some examples. Of course, not every movie can afford a poster without images in it, but you’d be surprised at the variety of films in which this approach does work. These are posters in which a picture is not worth a thousand words, but the other way around. ![]() Those are authentic typographic movie posters. The DefinitionĪ good poster designer will always keep the bigger picture in mind, combining images and words to find the best way to convey the film’s essence and not break typographic rules while doing so.īut for a movie poster to be considered typographic, it is necessary for the designers to be bolder, to dare avoid conventions and safe formulas, to go further: they need to make posters with little to no images in them, even posters with no photographs or illustrations, in which typography is the sole protagonist. But does that mean that they are typographic movie posters? Not really. After all, movie posters are advertisements, and choosing a font to write the movie’s title equals choosing how to show the product’s name to potential customers.Īll decent movie posters have appropriate choices regarding typography, and all fantastic movie posters have outstanding typography designs. There is no shortage of articles in this blog that highlight the importance of typography in poster design.
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