Movie posters tend to run in visual trends. Sometimes Hollywood marketing departments fall into a rut of simply showing the main actor’s head shot in close up. And if you pay attention to the last few posters for Nicholas Sparks adaptations, you’ll notice they pretty much always show a man and a woman in profile, just about ready to kiss.
But as this amusing new Web site points out, the influence of graphic designer Saul Bass – who famously collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock on so many legendary posters and credit sequences – is prevalent … and it’s time for people to ease off the “tributes” for a little while. Titled “Enough With Saul Bass Already,” the site takes a few famous movies and gives them the Bass treatment, with hilarious comments:
“I hope Chris Cooper kicks open the dorm room door of whoever made this and beats the shit out of them,” they say about this American Beauty one sheet.
“To properly kill a zombie you must destroy their brains, or bust out some serious jazz hands and slay ‘em with song and dance.”
Call me crazy, but I’m one of the few who believe that the overly hyped Mondo posters fall into this category of far-too-minimalist to get me very excited. The most recent one simply showed a bat with a quote from Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys. I mean, I guess?
What do you think? Are you still digging on the barebones approach to movies posters? Listen, when a poster works, it’s fair for other studios to want to try and copy that success and wrap it around their own design. But when we think back to the posters that we want hanging on our walls, they are the ones that raised the bar in the first place … not simply tried to grab the same bar someone already set. Enough with the Saul Bass posters. Let’s get our creative juices flowing and introduce a fresh design for movie posters in the year 2013.
