movie type
The secret code behind poster fonts: cracked.
When you’re creating a poster, you’re using lots of visual codes,” says Sarah Hyndman, typography specialist and author of Why Fonts Matter. With posters often the first step in a film’s multimillion dollar publicity campaign, getting it right is vital. Image, colour and type work in unison, but get the latter wrong and it can have disastrous consequences. “Use a typeface that jars with what’s being communicated and it can make the difference, in the same way that a badly cast actor might reduce credibility,” says Hyndman. But what you might not realise is how hard type is working to colour your impressions from first sight.“We read type quite subliminally, because we read it automatically,” Hyndman explains. “These references take a shortcut to our brains. So you’re conveying a lot of information very, very economically.” Here are 14 famous poster fonts, and what they tell us about their respective films…
Titanic 1997 1
“This is one of the typefaces that always gets written about,” explains Hyndman. “It was released around 1990 but is inspired by old Roman engravings, and suggests something that’s as epic as the Roman Empire. When Titanic came out, if you saw this typeface, you knew it was going to be a huge, big-budget film. But when these movies started winning Oscars, lots more started using it, and it lost the fact that it was a historic movie. Gradually it became visual code simply for ‘movie’. It became the Helvetica of film posters for a long time.”
Avatar 2009 2
“This caused outrage among the design community because Avatar was such a big-budget movie, and it had effectively used a free font [ Papyrus]. It’s a typeface that looks like it’s been written on ancient Egyptian papyrus, and one we associate with spiritual undertones, in part thanks to internet memes. The only thing that hints at it being sci-fi is the iridescent blue and starlight. In the same way Interstellar was telling you that the main theme was not sci-fi, this is telling you the same thing. And that they didn’t have a very big budget for the typeface!”
Casablanca 1942 7
“These style of typefaces were very fashionable in the ’50s. Quite often you will see them associated with something feminine, like a romance. Also, because it looks handwritten, it’s the kind of style you might see in a comic book. But here you make some different associations.”
Fight Club 1999 8
“This is bold. It’s very big. It’s almost a wall of type in front of you. It’s sloping forward, so it’s telling you ‘fast-paced’. But there are visual codes that are a little confusing when you combine it with the imagery. The type looks like a sci-fi movie, but the imagery definitely doesn’t. It’s a condensed, customised version of a famous typeface called Bauhaus. Bauhaus was inspired by an art movement where they were questioning conventions and turning everything upside down, which the film also does. My assumption is they’re trying to be ambiguous. All you know is you’re going into something big and brash.”
Jurassic Park 1993 9
“There are various conventions that you see in type font posters, including things that tell you a film might be entertaining, like red, and bold shapes, or a chunky sans serif typeface like Neuland. With Jurassic
Park you can immediately tell this is an entertaining film because of those red streaks going through it [ modified Decotura Inline]. It’s a typeface that’s been used over and over again to tell people something is primitive or set in an ancient world, though that wasn’t its original purpose. It was called one of the eight worst fonts in the world by journalist Simon Garfield. I think that was harsh.” [ laughs]
Psycho 1960 10
“When I was looking at this poster, I realised: if you took the word ‘Psycho’ off, the rest of the poster doesn’t give you any clues as to what the film might be. If the typeface was untorn, it would look like a regular typeface. But ripping it up tells you instantly that normality is going to be torn apart, whether it’s through violence or whether it’s through your assumptions being completely turned on their head. So it gives quite an unsettling – and a very clear – message that this is not a happy, relaxing, entertaining film to watch.”
Interstellar 2014 11
“I really like this one because it’s where designers started layering up visual codes. It’s a really weird typeface for a science-fiction movie, but that’s the point! It’s a typeface you see on the mastheads of magazines like Vogue, and a lot of beauty products. It’s associated with elegance and femininity. So the minute you see it on a movie poster, you know it’s visual shorthand for a love story. The rest of the typeface is called Futura, which is a classic science-fiction typeface. It underpins the rest of the poster by saying, ‘Don’t worry, it’s still science fiction!’”
Ra iders Of The Lost Ark (1981) 12
“The minute you look at that title, you know it’s going to be a fun, comic book-style action-adventure. If you see reds and yellows, and especially chunky typefaces, those quite often suggest a film is going to be a comedy. The second typeface is incredibly geometric. It looks very sci-fi, so maybe it’s telling you there is a slight sci-fi element to it.”
The Terminator 1984 13
“This was inspired by a NASA logo called the ‘worm’, which was first released in the mid-’70s. Now, it’s been digitised and turned into a font you can download, but The Terminator used a customised version. Because of the NASA link it looks completely timeless. It says science, technology and bigger, overarching themes.”
Metropolis 1927 14
“Metropolis was influenced by the styles and themes and the art movements of the time. The whole era was about celebrating the rise of the machine, but also fear of rapid mechanisation. This is represented by the angular, metallic type, with ‘Metropolis’ literally carved out of metal. Also, the spiky shapes show: ‘There’s a dark side to this. Be a bit wary.’ The other thing to note is that this would have been created as one piece of art where the elements were designed to fit together like a jigsaw, as opposed to creating the elements separately and layering them up.”