EXPRESSIVE WORDS

The task was to select five words and explore their expressive quality by manipulating the letterforms. 

TYPE PATTERNS

EVALUATION

The assignment was to make a horror film poster that was inspired by the distinctive minimalist style of graphic designer Saul Bass.

I began the assignment by researching horror film posters and pointing out the common styles, colours and design types that were used. I came to the conclusion that most horror film posters will use the colours black and red, I justified this as being because the colour black symbolises death, the unknown and fear. The colour red symbolises blood, danger, violence and evil. All of which are common elements of horror film. From this research, I then was able to use typical elements of horror film posters while still being original and creating a unique poster.

The process of making the poster in my case didn’t turn out to be so straight forward. I had made a poster for the film ‘The Night Listener’ and was very proud of it; however, some features of the poster didn’t abide by the guidelines of the task. This meant I had to start again and come up with new creative ideas! I then came across an Alfred Hitchcock horror film called ‘The Birds’ and once I saw excerpts of the film, I began to imagine a Saul Bass style poster for the film in my head. So straight away I sketched the idea down, and began work on it the next day. I’m much happier now with my final poster than I was with the original.

To create my final poster I used Adobe Illustrator. I arranged a group of black bird silhouettes together to form the main image for the poster using the pen tool. I did this because the whole film is based on a swarm of birds, so I felt this to be an effective way to represent the film using vectors. Once I had created the image, I went on to form the title and placing the other text on the poster. I used a bold typeface called Zentropa. I chose to use the bold font because the image was very attention grabbing, so I needed a font that would stand out among all the birds.

Many changes were made throughout the process of creating my final poster. For example, the first draft of the poster that I had made, I found to have too much text included, bearing in mind Saul Bass’ style was minimalist. So some of the text that was originally included on the poster was deleted to create a more simplistically Saul Bass style.

The colours I used for my final poster were Black, White and Red. I used these colours because the birds from the film were all black, so I illustrated them to be black on the poster as they were in the film. The colour red was used as there are some scenes involving blood (like most horror films).

Overall I am very happy with my final outcome and think the changes I made to it have been effective in making the poster simple and follow the Saul Bass style theme.