From the archives... Silent Madness (in 3D!)

The other day, in a search for illustrated film posters for John Carpenter films, I stumbled upon a site named Cover Browser. Maintained by Phillip Lenssen, the site features nearly half a million images from the covers of comics, pulp magazines, books, as well as movie posters, and unusually for an archive of this size, the quality remains pretty high throughout. The site also contains this helpful piechart, which explains how the contents shape-up.There are plenty of similar archives out there, such as B-Movie poster site Wrong Side of The Art, or the 100 posters featured on Andrew Lindstrom's Well Medicated blog (Andrew's site also features some great collections of vintage tobacco ads, gig posters, and vintage space-age scenes), and I'll try to get round to featuring something on them soon. For now though, these examples come from Cover Browser's horror movie posters archive. Some, like this Saul Bass poster for Otto Preminger's 1965 thriller, Bunny Lake Is Missing, are refreshingly understated. Even this poster for George Romero's Day Of The Dead (not a film known for holding back on the red stuff) is well considered and very unlike most horror movie posters.
...then again some others are, y'know, not quite so understated... but then what would you expect from film with titles such as Silent Madness (In 3D!) and, er... The Cauldron of Death? Hard-hitting stuff indeed.

More Book Covers

The aptly named Book Cover Archive is a great place to look for inspiration. the archive includes over 1,100 contemporary book covers, which you can search for by author, title, designer, publisher, and even typeface (there are a whopping 66 covers which feature Futura, but only 2 that use Frutiger). Fine examples include this innovative series of A4 paper-based designs by Sanda Zahirovic, Jenny Grigg's covers for Peter Carey, or the consistently excellent Jonathan Gray.
Back on the vintage-theme, but also well worthy of attention is this collection of 30 Polish book covers featured

on A Journey Round My Skull, and while I'm at it, there's a feature on some excellent Dick Bruna Covers (he's not just for rabbits, y'know) on Grain Edit.

Art Of The Arcade

Got a hankering for some retro graphics? Take a look at Paul Giacherio's Art Of The Arcade blog, which features images of original promotional materials, psychedelic illustrations of game environments, portraits of some of the righteous dudes who created the games, and proof that, for a very short time at least, the marketing people behind these campaigns tried to convince the public that video games were sexy.... yeah, that didn't quite catch on, did it?

Movie title stills: part 2 (in COLOUR!)

Okay, so I've gushed over film title screen shots from the earlier half of the 20th Century, now how do the later ones fair? Well, some of them are very good. There's no unifying style, instead the titles tend to either reflect the content of the film, or ignore the content all together in favour of more discreet use of typography.

And there's definitely a trend in more contemporary films towards very discreet titles. Although each of the following uses a distinct and no doubt carefully chosen typeface, from first glance they appear virtually identical.

So what does this say about modern audiences? Are we more astute in our understanding of typographic detail? Or do the film-makers simply want to let their films (and in some cases, the special effects) do the talking?

Movie Stills: part 1

This Movie Title Stills Collection, compiled by web-designer Christian Annyas is very special. Featuring over 800 title stills from movies dating from 1920 to the present day, the site presents the stills in handy chronological order.

Most of the earlier featured films (up to around the 1950s) include alternate screen shots from the films' trailers, and the screens that appeared to announce the end of the film. Some of these are obviously stock images used by the studios for a variety of films, but other, such as this first one, from King Kong, follow the design of the opening title.

Christian also runs a site called Art of the Title Sequence, which features appraisals of many sequences, plus interviews with their creators. Well worth a look, as it also contains quicktime videos of all the sequences, many of which are not available on YouTube.