Here it is, YLF Picture Perfect Challenge - Spring 2013.
I will publish the results and schedule the following day, Saturday 6th April. The challenge will run from Monday 8th until Friday 12th April.
The candidates:
1. Metropolis (1927): The way the geometric shapes of the city and typography contrast with the flowing lines of the female robot, and the use of a limited colour palette of Sepia tones and black all add to the poster's unique appeal.
2. Gone with the Wind (1939): The "Gone with the Wind" poster has that iconic old Hollywood painted artwork style from the 30s. It visually focuses on a large-scale Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara engulfed in flames and passionately rising out of miniature scenes of action below. The colors and backdrop of fire are iconic to both the story of the main characters' relationship and the chaos of the story, making it memorable and immediately recognisable to anyone who has seen the movie."
3. Vertigo (1958): The careers of designer Saul Bass and auteur Alfred Hitchcock are forever intertwined. As well as storyboarding the famous Psycho shower scene and creating the title sequence of North by Northwest, Bass lent his signature style to this poster for Vertigo. Its vivid colours, sharp angles and spiragraph-stlye detailing mean this poster still adorns many a bedroom wall today. The chaotic font is very much of its time and yet the almost brazenly bold composition ensures the poster has a timeless quality too.
4. Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961): Every woman wanted to be her, and every man wanted to be with Audrey Hepburn. Everything about this is iconic: the long cigarette, the jewels, the cat and her long black dress.
5. Jaws (1975): Tony Seiniger’s agency spent six months perfecting the poster. “No matter what we did, it didn’t look scary enough,” he told USA Today in 2003.
The problem was that no matter how they were drawn, the sharks ended up looking more like friendly dolphins. Then, in a stroke of genius, Seiniger realised where they had been going wrong. “You had to actually go underneath the shark so you could see his teeth.”
6. Star Wars (1977): The imagery stirred the imagination like nothing I had previously seen. Prior to seeing the revolutionary film, the striking design conjured so many enticing questions in our young creative minds about who these people were and what this story was all about.
7. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981): The Raiders trilogy harked back to a time when men were real men, women were real women, and swarthy racial stereotypes were real swarthy racial stereotypes. This comic-book style poster design by Richard Amsel is a young boy's dream - full of swashbuckling adventure, foreign devils and a splash of romance.
8. Pulp Fiction (1994): The femme fatale fixing you with her cold eyes, the cigarette, the gun. Then there are the trappings of the cheap and nasty paperbacks of the past. The magazine masthead, the 10-cent price tag, the creases. Pulp Fiction is a throw back to the hardboiled noir of the past and yet still feels dangerously contemporary.
9. American Beauty (1999): A perfect example here of how simplicity can often produce the most memorable results.
10. Walk the Line (2005): It’s interesting that only a few simple “carved” lines (such as in actor’s hairline) in the movie poster immediately identify the image as being that of Johnny Cash. The typeface and woodcut technique are also a good fit for the country music subject matter, without falling into the trap of looking like an album cover. Needless to say, this is a departure from most movie posters, both in style and the fact that it is illustrated.
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