28 January 2013

Minimal Movie Posters

One of my favorite design blogs out there is Minimal Movie Posters. They have some great and even inspirational pieces. It's very refreshing to see your favorite films portrayed in the simplest terms, using no photography. This example is one of my personal favorites:


Those who have seen the Star Wars movies will instantly recognize this scene - Tatooine's sunset, with its twin suns. Using a few simple shapes, elegant type, color, and texture the designer has successfully depicted an iconic scene from this film and created that association. I think this is really great minimalist design and serves as a good poster for the right audience. However, people other than Star Wars fans would have a difficult time understanding this poster, which is why not much of this design is used commercially. I find that I don't understand posters on this blog for movies that I haven't seen, which is perhaps the one flaw.

4 comments:

  1. You are pretty spot on about your description of the blog. I checked it out and the movies that I recognized were clever designs and use details of movies that are iconic, but often overlooked. An example could be the Despicable Me poster that is obviously a minion's eye to someone who has seen the movie, but I could see how a person who has not seen the movie would find this confusing. Regardless of whether it is recognizable or not, I think it draws a person's interest even more than a regular movie poster because I found myself wondering WHY a certain object was used in the poster and what it meant. These are great design works because they play with the negative space and whimsical aspects like mismatched reflections and simple colors.

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  2. I like how these movie posters use clean, simple design elements and techniques to depict meaningful scenes and key parts of these films. I also like how they are not congested compared to typical movie posters. Although these posters may seem more compelling to an audience who has seen the movie and has nostalgic feelings when recognizing symbolic elements, I agree that this artistic, minimalistic approach could be even more intriguing to people who have not seen the movie. People desire to understand symbolic meaning in stories and are curious about the background knowledge, and reasons for the design factors that are included. These posters could also promote future commodities related to these well known movies as people enjoy being able to create new things out of classic ideas.

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  3. Minimalistic approaches are great, especially these designs made for some very iconic movies! I completely agree that you pretty much have to see the movie, or at least a trailer of it to understand its few elements presented to the viewers eye. In my opinion, I think that these can sometimes be harder to do because of such little to work with but that also captures the essence of it all- finding a significant but also sometimes over looked detail. It could also conflict with viewers on their perception of what the most important part of the movie was to them. Despicable Me for instance, yes the little yellow minions were iconic but also wouldn't the three little girls be it too? the moon? the funny but scary looking dog? No matter what, these always turn out great even if you haven't yet 'scene' the movie or know where the illustration/graphic is from

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  4. I love the minimal look but I feel like they don't do their job as movie posters. Most of the time, you have to have seen the movie to understand what the poster is trying to portray, and that's fine from an artistic perspective but I don't know how well these would work as actual movie posters.

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