The Trip - Movie Poster

Original Dubonnet Wine Poster

Designer Daily brings us another one of their great collections. This one looks at movie posters from last year. Most seem to be from indie films which is not just OK, but pretty appropriate and not surprising since most Hollywood big budget blockbuster movie posters aren’t really concerned with good design. Instead they want to get you in the theater right ASAP.

All of these movie posters do an awesome job at letting you know very quickly what the movie is about (which is after all, the function of the movie poster in the first place).

I chose to include the one for the movie The Trip (which is great BTW–I thank my wife for suggesting we watch it) because it is clearly and purposely ripping off of the famous Dubonnet wine advertisement poster from 1956.

The writers at Designer Daily also recommend this gallery at Mubi.com which includes these plus more goodies, and some actual big budget hollywood blockbuster type movie posters that actually are good. You can view the full gallery at Designer Daily here. Happy movie watching!

Absolut Blank Online Gallery

Iconic vodka Absolut continues the iconic branding campaign with a delightful gallery of finished Absolut-bottle-silohuette-turned-work-of-art pieces that are as fresh as 30 years ago when the campaign was new. The original campaign was created around 1980 by advertising agency TBWA. The focus of the campaign has always been  the unique shape of the bottle. TBWA worked with photographer Steven Bronstein, and now includes more than 1500 ads. It is the company’s longest running campaign. It’s clear why and why it has many more years to come. Always nice to peruse all the iterations of the now familiar bottle.

Metropolis movie poster

I have to admit that I was looking forward to seeing the posters in this collection by Designer Daily. I think they’re very good for the most part. But the ones that I’m still thinking about are the ones that I did not expect to see in this collection.

I didn’t have any posters in mind, but I was not surprised to see the awesome Metropolis poster, 50′s sci-fi posters like The Forbidden Planet, and swinging 60′s posters like Vertigo. Those are the kind that while they do show very iconic and memorable eras of the movie posters, they represent what we already knew–our own western and typically commercial movie posters.

This collection becomes more memorable because it is including different posters that are from other countries and film genres. I was very glad to see the poster for The Wall (rock musical film), and the posters from movies from other countries like Teorema.

The collection also shows that no matter what era, a great movie poster could be executed many different using different elements to support the composition and convey the meaning. From typography to image+type placement to shapes+lines, you can clearly see that there is an abundance of things to do that are unique.

Why then is it that so many movie posters today have so many floating heads, cityscapes, actors standing around, and so many other unimaginative things. There is so much to choose from.

Jekyll & Hyde Movie Poster update

Classic movie posters used to be very indicative of what was happening in the world of design at any given time. Yes, there were many that were derivative and looked like many other posters, but there was plenty of ground being covered and many unique posters. Not so much anymore. Many movie posters look alike today, and that’s about it. I was very glad to see this post by Communication Arts.

The post shows a sample of movie posters that were updated by update to advertise Turner Classic Movies’ summer movie event Summer Under The Stars. This annual programming event features the films of a different movie star each day during the month of August.

This year, New Jersey’s One Trick Pony launched a website that captured the films with an updated look to promote event. They all look great and really capture the films. The full Summer Under the Stars site launched August 1 , showcasing 31 posters for classic films, each redesigned with a contemporary look. The site featured a calendar of dowloadable posters, a full programming schedule complete with a video clip for each title, a Twitter feed that updated what was playing through the month, and a widget that highlighted a new photo and video that reflected the current programming schedule.

Moss Grafitti

Designer Daily brings us this collection of urban marking/marketing approaches that have clearly evolved (or de-evolved) with the times. This reflects the attitutes of a new generation of designers who not only want to do something different, but they view their surroundings in a different way. They’re more in touch with nature, and they’re concerned with materials and the impact of their designs on a global/environmental scale. More marketing than self-expression, they show a degree of creativity that is unusual for urban art. For now. They certainly grab attention.

They’ve grouped this collection into mini-series. Let’s see. We have Moss Grafitti, where text and graphics are on-the-wall and made of moss or grass. Very earthy. Chalk art is very playful and versatile and cheap. No steady hands? Make a stencil! Very nice. I dig the rock-n-roll logo/ad.

Reverse Grafitti

Reverse Grafitti is probably my favorite, simply because it involves removing what’s already there (dirt, mostly) and creating the designs in reverse. These have an air of purification somehow. They’re almost luminous because more light is reflected off the clean surface–much like when the wall was freshly painted or the concrete wall built. Very easy on the eyes.

Snow tagging is not only cool and has a nice texture, but it has the least impact of all. This type of communication is very temporary. And working with snow has a built-in expiration time. It’s also cheap to make your mark with a stencil and go around tagging snow around a city after a fresh snowfall.

Fur Coat Graffitti is more art than marketing but it certainly has its uses and it does grab attention. They show examples of animal shapes. Maybe throw in a little Fur Text? PETA anyone?

AIGA Design Archives Online

Love to look at what others are doing? Looking for inspiration? Love to look at excellent design? Head on over to the AIGA Design Archives, which feature selection from AIGA’s Annual Design Competitions. Covering everything from Brand and Identity Systems Design to Book Design, you’ll find a wealth of resources. With a sleek interface that’s easy to figure out and navigate, it’s a pleasure to browse through. Excellent design? Check. Inspiring? Check.

Works on the archive are selected from these AIGA competitions:

• About 365: AIGA Annual Design Competition
• About 50 Books/50 Covers competition
• Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing & Criticism
• Worldstudio AIGA Scholarships
• INDEX: | AIGA Aspen Design Challenge
• Regional AIGA competitions

I flip through these when I get them in print form every year as part of my AIGA membership, and it’s always a celebration of good design. Not just good looking, but good design. Good design looks good most of the time, but really isn’t it just doing it’s job? It makes us comfortable looking at the information, even inviting us sometimes. Making us feel comfortable (or uncomfortable) with the message. One of my professors told us once that Design is a logical sequence of events. And I agree with him. There’s an audience, a context, and a purpose. These are considered and evaluated, research has focuses our options, and execution and refinement have polish the project to a degree which makes the design exceptional.

Of course, good design often looks easy, and that’s part of the appeal. It looks easy because it’s relating to the viewer. The viewer feels almost like they could have thought of it themselves. And that’s a very good thing if you want to get your message across.

Neiman Marcus print ad

One of my favorite things about design is typography. One can do so much with it–and yet so many pay little attention to it. John Berry’s Dot Font column on Creativepro.com is a great source for those of us who love typography. This particular article shows great examples of how type and type alone can be used to compose a great design. I like that he opens with a piece by Herb Lubalin, who I think is great. he looked at type like nobody else did before or after.

Examples from newspapers, books, advertising, and fine art show amazing uses of expressive typography. In these examples it’s hard to imagine the type placed anywhere else or doing something else. Expressive typography can inject meaning to the design, offer visual puns, be used as texture, reinforce the meaning of the words in the design, or simply exist as art.

Although there is no specific standard to using type in an expressive way, the result looks like it was very easy to do because it looks so natural. This is not the case. Designs that use type in an expressive way can range from requiring a modest assessment of the purpose of the design in order to take a direction with the expressive type–to requiring extensive research and experimentation to meet the goals of the design. It can be a lot of fun too. Expressive type allows us to use (sometimes) type in ways that type is traditionally not used. We can use principles like repetition, anomaly, placement, and kerning.

Sample courtesy of Creativepro.com.

Rocky IV movie poster

Head back over to Designer Daily for a different collection of Cold War propaganda. This time the focus is on pro-america. All the examples are from post World War II. It also covers literature and comic books, media and advertising, and movies. Note how much more commercial the types of media that are covered. The nature of the west or a product of the post-WWII boom, or both?

I can’t help but notice how much more emphasis this collection puts on making the other side a villain. I also don’t think it’s mere coincidence and that the folks that gathered these had anything like this in mind when they put these together. As a mid-thirties Gen-Xer I clearly remember how the east was portrayed everywhere in the media up until the end of the Cold War–and even after. Rocky IV is still one of my favorite movies of all time despite all of this.

Another thing that I noticed, is that the commercial nature of many of the samples in this collection–and therefore the lofty goal of reaching vast audiences, takes away from the designs and leaves and they fall short of greatness. They don’t even evoke any nostalgia. Hm.

Sample courtesy of Designer Daily.