If you’re in a theater during previews, and you see this ….
… you know to expect a comedy movie.
If you see this — you know it’s going to be action.
Make the letters a little skinny — and boom.
It’s sci-fi.
You know this one's going to have fast cars...
This one’s going to have Michael Cera…. … and this one’s gonna be a rom-com.
You don’t even need the music to know it.
But what about this?
This typeface — Trajan – is probably one of the most popular movie poster fonts ever.
You can see it in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Double Jeopardy, Letters from Iwo Jima,
It’s everywhere.
So how did it get there?
I'm Yves Peters, I am a graphic designer who has been writing professionally about type
and typography since about 10 years.
Yves has looked at a lot of posters.
And a few years ago, he started to notice a trend.
I started clicking, clicking, clicking, and didn't know where I started because I ended
up looking at about 16,000 posters.
Yeah.
Well I look at about 100 posters per month and I've been doing this series since 2006…
It’s a lot of posters every year.
He noticed that the use of Trajan rose significantly in the last couple of decades.
But why?
In 1989, designer Carol Twombly adapted inscriptions from Roman emperor Trajan’s column into
a digital typeface.
It was made for Adobe, so it was a part of the software that a lot of people were starting
to use to make posters.
A couple years later, it made its movie poster debut here — for Héctor Babenco’s
At Play in the Fields of the Lord.
After that, it was on The Bodyguard, and Scent of a Woman.
Then it was on three 1993 box office hits.
By 1994, it was everywhere.
It's originally used for epic movies, movies about people that overcome difficulties, like
the big war epics and so on.
But then you see gradually that it becomes the standard movie font.
It's like the Arial of movie posters.
So people need to churn out a poster really quickly, and they just pick Trajan.
Eventually, that overuse changed the kinds of movies that used the typeface.
You don’t see it as much on the big productions anymore.
It's become the typeface of horror movies, B-movies, and also the straight-to-video ones.
So you'll see that a lot of posters are for the lesser movies that want to pretend they
are better than they actually are.
The rise and fall of Trajan illustrates the downside of digital typeface.
The convenience of swapping fonts is a huge shift from old movie poster days when hand-painted
typefaces or "lettering" was an art that was specific to each movie.
So what you see behind me — this is more like the pre-blockbuster thing...
pre-genres, pre-standard styles — and that's why you will be hard pressed to find
two that are similar.
That doesn’t make today’s genre-specific typography bad design.
These visual clichés make it possible to communicate tone and plot details to an audience
incredibly efficiently.
And there’s a certain art to that.
People get nostalgic about the old era of movie posters, when everything was still done
by hand and still very unique.
But you could compare it to music, where some people say, “nothing good was produced since
the Beatles.”
But then there are people who say there’s nothing good since Mozart.
Fair enough, but there's many other interesting things that are being produced now.
There’s just much more.
But there's still a lot of very good poster design happening.
It’s just, you need to know where to look.”