Art Deco & Today’s Posters

Art History

Art Deco is decorative art style that uses precise and bold geometric shapes and curves, as well as strong colors and lines. Now I’m not a big fan of Art Deco, but I can’t deny the fact that Art Deco works have the ability to bring back the “Roarin’ 20s” look and feel. It’s very retro! Be it architecture, posters or patterns, the Art Deco style reflects the playfulness and merriment of the 1920s’ that continued up until World War II. We can still see Art Deco in places like the Chrysler Building in New York and Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. But in the world of poster design, it reemerged with period films like The Artist in 2011, and then with The Great Gatsby remake in 2013. Both of these movies are heavily influenced by Art Deco since they take place during height of this movement. As a result, this is reflected in their respective posters. The movie poster for The Artist features a condensed decorative typeface that is similar to other Art Deco typefaces. The posters for The Great Gatsby show the dramatic curves and the strong lines that define Art Deco. This is also mirrored in the typeface as well. The text is bold and blocky, and connected to the rest of the poster by the mirrored vertical and curved lines in the letterforms. Both of these posters give off a rich and retro feel to them. However, I find that The Great Gatsby emulates the Art Deco style more because of the setting and the plot.

Sources:

https://99designs.com/blog/creative-inspiration/art-deco-a-strong-striking-style-for-graphic-design/

http://www.mtv.com/news/2770606/art-deco-in-film/

Images from Google

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Minimal Harry Potter Posters

Movie Posters

The Potterhead (= Diehard Harry Potter fan!) and book lover in me rejoiced when I caught eye of this pin on Pinterest the other day! These were done by a designer and illustrator named Risa Rodil. She has perfectly captured a key moment (or moments) from each of the Harry Potter novels in a simplistic manner that clearly can catch other Potterheads attention. I also like her typeface choices, as well. She used a san serif typeface to emphasize the book title and author line, and paired it with an italicized serif typeface for the “and the” part title. She also showed some hierarchy with the different sized book title and the author line, along with the “and the” part of the title, too. Each of these posters resonate with the wonderful wizarding world of Harry Potter! The minimalistic visual approach to these posters and the crinkled paper texture in the background, add a certain depth to them. The posters incite a nostalgic and gritty feeling inside one’s self. The only thing I would change about these posters would be the poster for Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prince. It took me a few minutes to realize that the illustration for this particular poster was a pensive (an object to view one’s memories). I would either create a new illustration that shows the pensive nicely, or I would choose a different moment from the this book like the Halfblood Prince’s potions book. On the whole, these posters have clearly depicted the magic of the Harry Potter series very well, even with minimal details.

Check out Risa Rodil’s Behance page: https://www.behance.net/Risarodil

She has done some cool things with typography!

Dada Photomontages & Today

Art History, Movie Posters

The Dada movement came about as reaction against violence of World War I. The movement challenged art itself and included elements of strong negativity and destructiveness. In Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, it stated that, “Dada artists claimed to have invented photomontage…” This technique took found photographs, and manipulated them to create an unpleasant closeness to each of them. It also made the viewer create weird/forced associations amongst the images. The pioneers of photomontage work during the Dada movement were Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch. They had been excelling on this medium since 1918.

Today, we still see this technique in use in our current movie posters. The posters that immediately come to mind, for me, are Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Captain America, and Iron Man. Each of these posters combined images directly taken out from the film, images taken just for the film, and background images. Although the images aren’t dramatically juxtaposed like Dada montages, they are planned out like Dada montages. They are manipulated, as well, to have to create an interesting movie poster to entice audiences all over the world. Dada photomontages were the quintessential advertising technique, of that time, for the violence and destructiveness of war. Just like that, movie posters have been, and will continue to be, one of the key advertising methods for movie promotion all over the world.