It's just life

Funny that I should write so little about graphic design on this blog. After all, it's what I do for a living... Maybe I should change that soon. After all, I love good graphic design with a passion. For instance, I love movie posters, well some movie posters that is. Most movie posters these days are just pastiche work of all the exciting scenes from the movie (like the poster for Pirate's of the Caribbean: Dead man's chest) with the photoshopped heads ot the superstars hovering above it all. If I did these posters, there's a danger that I would make them look a lot like this. With this kind of image material, it's easy, doesn't take much creativity but is still very attractive. Sometimes I pick the path of least resistance when doing graphic design. I hit myself over the head about it and try to change

Now, the design for a film such as The Devil Wears Prada goes down a different route. Conceptual posters are few and far between, but they leave a much more lasting impression on the ones who see them. Because concept requires creativity and not just technique. This is a film I would probably not see, but the design is refreshing in a movie star oriented poster business. It's a shame though that this shoe has been cropped so badly (unlike on the movie homepage http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/thedevilwearsprada/. I guess it's because of the vertical format - why do all posters have the same proportions anyway - I propose posters of different shapes and sizes...

And of course, you have the classics, like Alien. It probably doesn't get any better than the design for the Alien poster, especially considering the brilliant tagline: "In space no one can hear you scream". Pure class!

But you know what's most annoying about movie posters. It's the extremely ridiculous, absolutely laughable habit of shuffling the names around so that they DO NOT MATCH the order of the headshots on the photograph below. What dicks! These designers can't be this stupid, this must be some idiotic Hollywood bureacracy/hierarchy sort of thing.