Poster Trends: Footnotes for the Future (part I)

So you may have noticed I've been writing a lot about movie posters. Is my only ambition to become a movie poster designer? No, it isn't exactly my highest ambition, but I am sort of obsessed with them. In general though, I'm just very interested in how we choose represent stories in any medium with just one single image. It's not something that's going away any time soon. No matter how advanced technology gets, now matter how far removed our entertainment outlets get from printed media, stories will need posters or cover art, of some sort, to represent them and grab the attention of a target audience.

By looking at so many different design choices, good and bad, and seeing how much of it is repeated, I can get a broader sense of the design sensibilities that will define my generation, and thus I can begin to speculate on what sort of trends may become the norm in the future.

Already I've begun to see some trends among amateur and professional poster designers who are finding new ways to represent older films. Here are some styles I've noticed that could very well become a trend in the distant (or, not-so-distant) future.





A designer named Olly Moss has a small collection of posters made only in black and red and the results are excellent. It's definitely a minimalist approach, but the capacity to get so much across using so little is something that I think more and more poster designers may end up utilizing in future poster designs to set themselves apart. Of course, it will take a pretty adventurous marketing department to put their faith in this kind of design in the current marketing climate. There is a lot to compete against.

More to come in Part II.