Posters Through the Ages

1920/30’s

• In the 1930s, we see a shift towards bolder typographic designs with a growing tendency towards illustrations focusing on main characters of the film, particularly faces, over depictions of scenes from the movie.

1950’s

• In the 1950s we start to see poster designers experimenting with conceptual approaches, such as the ‘Love in the Afternoon’ poster, which is free of characters, emphasizing typography and subtle clues as to the movies theme/genre forming the type’s background.

1970’s

• An example of the fast movement of trends in the design industry, the 70’s sees photography play a big role in posters for the first time, often taking up the bulk of the canvas with type thrown in below, seemingly as an afterthought.

1980’s

• The 80’s is where we start to see the movie poster in a form similar to what we’re used to seeing today. Large photographic backgrounds are more common than ever, but type and imagery are more balanced than we’ve seen in previous decades.

1990’s

• Posters of the 90’s are reasonably formulaic: we’ve got the photographic backgrounds, pithy slogans at the top, and the names of headline actors sitting quietly above the name of the film, usually situated mid or bottom of the poster.

Examples of Irish Documentary Posters 

 

In comparison to some of the international film posters as seen above, these Irish film posters still contain some of the same elements from previous decades. They portray a main character as the focus of the poster, as well as a small snippet of a scene from the documentary.

MAKING THE GRADE – KEN WARDROP

Inspiration:

When we interviewed the director, Caitriona, she made reference to an irish documentary called “Making The Grade”, by Ken Wardrop. This documentary has a very simplistic and minimalistic feel to it, it focuses on a number of characters, all very different from one another but are all facing the same situation, which is, learning to play piano, but explores their individual perspectives on it.

This is the same atmosphere that Caitriona wanted to create in her documentary.  She wanted to create a non-scripted, feel good piece of film, nothing sugar coated, nothing staged, just real people and their outlook on life in Ireland.

              

 

CREATING THE POSTER: 

Font:

One thing the director was sure of was the font she wanted to use. The font is called “Lato” and was perfect for this poster. It is a simple sans serif typeface, nothing fancy, this meant that the primary focus was not on the font, but on the poster itself.

“Lato is a sanserif type­face fam­ily designed in the Sum­mer 2010 by Warsaw-​​based designer Łukasz Dziedzic (“Lato” means “Sum­mer” in Pol­ish). In Decem­ber 2010 the Lato fam­ily was pub­lished under the open-​​source Open Font License by his foundry tyPoland, with sup­port from Google“.     –    LatoFonts.com

Style:

When speaking to Caitriona about the style of the poster she mentioned a grid-like structure, where each character would have their own section of poster. See example below:

     

Again, she wanted something simple, each character in their grid with a white background and the title at the bottom.

POSTER LOG BOOK:

1st Poster Draft – 29/1/2019:

This is the first poster draft i cam up with. I first had the idea of not showing any faces, so i decides to go with the feet as each character was so different, one an elderly man from dublin, a farmer, and a foreign immigrant, this meant that their choice of footwear where complete contrasts and made for an interesting poster. The client liked this layout  but i had more ideas to explore.

2nd Poster Draft – 13/2/2019:

For my second poster draft i wanted to experiment with the ripped paper effect, to show the contrast of each character. Unfortunately the client did not like this effect as it took away from the ‘simplistic’ approach she wanted to create.

 

3rd Poster Draft – 26/3/2019:

For my third poster draft i wanted to experiment without the grid structure. I used just one character for this poster but still attempted to disguise their identity. I liked this poster, i felt it kept with the simplistic feel but it did not really suit the theme of the documentary.

4th Poster Draft – 29/4/2019:

For this poster i was nearing the final design. It had everything the client was looking for, it just needed a few minor adjustments and edits.

Final Poster Design – 7/5/2019:

Overall i was happy with how my poster turned out, it met the brief of the client and it came out well.

TIME MANAGEMENT CHART:

 

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