The dying art of movie posters and book covers

[JarodRussell]

Read this rather depressing article on recent movie posters.

http://movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-...184257816.html


Anyone remember the days where movie posters were creative works of art? Just take the posters of Drew Struzan (Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, etc...)

http://www.drewstruzan.com/illustrated/portfolio/


Book covers suffer from the same thing. They look terrible, like 5 minute jobs in Photoshop with quickly copied and pasted stock photos, when years ago they were fondly composited and painted.


Just what's going on there?

[Guy Gardener]

You need to judge a cover by it's book.

[JarodRussell]

Here's a very interesting article on Graphic Design Trends in Hollywood. More and more of the same stuff for similar films, and more and more of what looks like quick and dirty Photoshop attacks.

[FPAlpha]

JarodRussell wrote:

---

Read this rather depressing article on recent movie posters.

http://movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-...184257816.html


Anyone remember the days where movie posters were creative works of art? Just take the posters of Drew Struzan (Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, etc...)

http://www.drewstruzan.com/illustrated/portfolio/


Book covers suffer from the same thing. They look terrible, like 5 minute jobs in Photoshop with quickly copied and pasted stock photos, when years ago they were fondly composited and painted.


Just what's going on there?

Well.. Struzan wasn't always original with his posters too.. taking the lead actors and just painting them from a scene of the movie isn't as genius as some would think.

Throughout all periods there was quality and garbage.. the posters mentioned of recent Hollywood pics are standard, non imaginative ones which do happen but there still are ones that break the mold.

For whatever someone might think of the Phantom Menace i liked this one really much which encapsulates the entire tragedy of a small boy who's fate it is to turn to a very evil man:

http://www.impawards.com/1999/poster...enace_ver1.jpg

Just because some marketing departments are lazy doesn't mean the entire business is.

[Greg Cox]

I think you're overestimating the problem where books are concerned. Sure, I've seem some bad photoshopped covers, too, but publishers are still putting out some very striking covers as well. I've been very happy with the covers I've gotten from Tor's art department in the last few years. Just go on amazon and check out the covers for Only Superhuman, The Six-Gun Tarot, and Other Kingdoms. And those are just the books I edited . . . .

Nightshade has been doing some gorgeous covers, too.

[Aeronef]

JarodRussell wrote:

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Just what's going on there?

You're exaggerating?

[C.E. Evans]

Stuff like this has been going on for decades--perhaps even since the earliest days. It's just easier to copy and paste several of them together and cry foul about them, IMO.

[tomswift2002]

Same thing could be said about video game covers. A lot of the newer video game covers I find don't even make me want to play the game. Large shot of one character. Okay, so what exactly does the one character tell me? They might tell me that it's a sports game or shooter, but the artwork doesn't really draw me in, like this old artwork:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ch...gers-cover.jpg

or how about this for Mega Man 3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Megaman3_box.jpg

What's going on with the robot with lightning bolts, or even why are they standing on what appears to be a metal world?

[Icemizer]

^You had to make the covers look great for games of that era because you sure didnt want to have any of the games actual graphics there. Most of the Atari 2600 games had awesome art on the boxes and then well you know what was inside.

As far as the overall artistic trend, some are good some are bad and some are in the middle. Of course your going to try and copy a popular poster, thats how the game works.

[Starbreaker]

Holy crap, Chip and Dale is favorite NES game.

[MacLeod]

Perhaps there is a psychological element, in that we may associate certain poses/emenets with what we expect from a film. So a simple glance would give you an idea of the type of film.

[sidious618]

I'm curious what some people's favorite book covers are. I love the original cover to American Psycho- link.

[tomswift2002]

Icemizer wrote:

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^You had to make the covers look great for games of that era because you sure didnt want to have any of the games actual graphics there. Most of the Atari 2600 games had awesome art on the boxes and then well you know what was inside.

As far as the overall artistic trend, some are good some are bad and some are in the middle. Of course your going to try and copy a popular poster, thats how the game works.

So you're saying that they shouldn't do the great covers for games nowadays because the graphics are better, and yet a lot of games nowadays are just copycats of each other.

[Mr Light]

I'm sick of movie posters that are nothing but face shots of the main actors. I want posts that show something unique from the movie itself. And the painted ones are awesome.

[trevanian]

Have you seen one of the foreign PROMETHEUS posters that has painted ship-to-ship and explosion action in it? It looks like it came from the DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER era, really really nice.