TYPO -
GRAPHY
IN FILM
By Brittany Hethcoat
MY GOAL:
-Reveal Typography tropes that designers use in Movie Posters/ Previews
-Make you hate TRAJAN (how this one typeface took over movie posters)
-Teach the origin of TRAJAN/ The Why?
THE MOST CROSS- GENRE POPULAR
-Featured in films like
-Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
-Minority Report
-Scent of a Woman
-Annihilation
-Quiz show
-A Beautiful Mind
-Human Centipede
-The Jungle Book
Carol Twombly 1989
Designed Trajan typeface from adapted inscriptions of Roman Emperor Trajan’s columns
1989, this Typeface Designer
Made for Adobe, it was becoming an essential part of the software that designers began to use for poster designs in the early 90’s
TRAJAN’s Column -> Digital typeface
FIRST MAJOR APPEARANCE 1992
First appeared on Hector Babenco’s
movie poster
“At Play in the Fields of the Lord” - 1992
Pretty significant (includes actors like Kathy
Bates, John Lithgow, Daryl Hannah,
Tom Waits)
BY 1994 TRAJAN IS EVERYWHERE
THE ARIAL OF MOVIE POSTERS
Trajan was originally used to epic movies like movies about people who overcome difficulty
-big war epics and so on
-gradually becomes standard “Arial of Movie Posters” - Yves Peters
-If one need to turn out a poster quickly pick Trajan
EFFECTS OF OVERUSING
Overusing Trajan’s changed the kinds of movies that use the typeface
-One won’t see it in big productions nowadays with Al Pacino, it’s become the typeface for horror movies, “B” movies, and straight to video ones
TRAJAN IS FOR THE LESSER MOVIES THAT WANT TO PRETEND THEY ARE BETTER THAN THEY REALLY ARE
GENRE SPECIFIC TYPOG. IS NOT BAD
In the end, these visual cliches make it possible to communicate tone and plot details to an audience really efficiently
Some people get nostalgic about the old era of movie posters
-everything was unique
-done by hand
THERE’S STILL A LOT OF GOOD MOVIE POSTER DESIGN HAPPENING YOU JUST NEED TO KNOW WHERE TO LOOK