The B-movie posters of mid-century horror films are iconic in graphic design. They are, by design, there to attract and shock an audience. They had to emulate the feel of the films they advertised but in a completely different way: the movies of the time were either black and white or full Technicolor, posters had a limited palette of only a few hues. They led the way with the use of three-dimensional sans-serif fonts. All this while managing to cling to the rigid coat tails of public decency was no mean feat.

I’m going to run you through making your own.

Tourism Australia went for nostalgia with their latest campaign in the WW2 poster style

Knowing how to simulate a style or era of graphic design is an important skill, especially when working in advertising. When walking through the streets of Sydney the other day I noticed Tourism Australia had done just that. It looked good and hit a nerve of nostalgia that is impossible to develop with modern designs. Let’s try something similar with the old-school movie poster. You will to be handy in photoshop for this tutorial because I won’t touch on any of the technical-stuff. This is just about finding the aesthetic.

Here's my finished poster. We'll run through how I achieved the look.

Reference, reference, reference

There are plenty decent sources for actual poster examples. I’d start with a Google image search, but The Wrong Side of the Art has a really good library of posters from the all genres.

Look at each poster and have a look at the composition (where things are positioned on the page), the texture (the size of the brush used and any dust and scratches on the finished-product), the colours (are they vivid or slightly undersaturated?) and of course the information on the poster, such as the film name and the tagline. You will find — almost without fail — that the average poster of the time had some or all of the following elements:

• A off-white base colour or border
• A contrasting set of two colour ranges (think red/black or yellow/blue)
• One simply-constructed villain or monster
• A few scared audience members
• An absurd film title (think ‘It Came From Space!’ or ‘Bloodsucking Leeches of Doom’)
• Finally, some kind of warning to how shocking the film is

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail

From the outset, I decided to target the sci-fi end of the market. It pays to have a near-complete understanding of the look you want to achieve before you put tablet pen to tablet. Anything without that is just grabbing in the dark. For my poster, I decided on a space theme because in the 50s, sci-fi was a popular genre as humans at the time were knocking at the door of the universe. I also decided to add some good-ol’ post-war xenophobia for added effect.

Simple geometry and colour

I used a simple contrast of undersaturated red and black

As I’ve touched on, the simple nature of the manufacture process meant these posters were simple in composition. Start your work with an off-white background that adds to that yellowed, faded effect.

From that, either built your poster on that plain background or use one or two key colours. For mine, I chose the black of space and the undersaturated red of an old Nazi flag. It might not be politically correct, but that was my inspiration!

Develop a villain

Notice the robot's lack of detail

The most striking object on all these posters is, without a doubt, the terrifying monster.

Because the posters at the time were hand-painted with only a few colours, the monsters themselves aren’t very detailed. This wasn’t a bad thing. Artists used solid colours and shadow-effects to underline the mysterious nature and not give too much away. Look at the example above! It’s basically a dark background with a black smudge in the middle of it. Looks like a finger painting of a third-grader… but that adds to it in my opinion. It’s atmospheric. Add the bright text and exaggerated tagline and you’ve got something people want to look at.

For my poster, I went for large, gnashing teeth within a shadowy helmet. Using the brush tool, I painted a set of teeth on a dark background. Remember, less is more when emulating hand-painted work — keep it rough and real.

Brushed teeth stand out from a dark background

Typefaces

The text was usually the most striking element on the poster and was designed to be read at a glance.

The posters of the era tended to use either simple, sans-serif type or unique, hand-painted text. I decided to develop themes over the top of some of todays more generic fonts. I used bolded Lucida Sans and Estrangelo Edessa but you can use any font that’s bold and wide with minimal kerning. I think Gotham would be a good place to start. It’s relatively chunky with nice, soft edges. The only rule is to use upper-case. Beyond that, don’t be afraid to experiment with the aspect or size of the text — just make it stand out. Posters of the time pioneered block and bubble text so use layer effects such as drop-shadow.

A good example of block type with perspective for that 'epic' effect

My favourite touch was adding a yellowing tinge to the inside edges of each character. This was achieved by adding a standard yellow Inner Glow to my rasterised text layer. It gave the impression the white of the ‘DEEP SPACE’ title had yellowed over time or was not printed perfectly. You will also notice the poster has a delicate blur that makes it look authentic. I’ll touch on that at the end of the post.

You must be creative with the major text

Elements maketh the poster

An understanding of composition is the difference between a poster that is sparse and unbalanced and one that is interesting but decipherable. Sure, you could design a poster that is minimalist and uses its own vaugueness to disturb (think the Saw movie posters) but that takes a lot of skill. I didn’t think I’d pull it off as well as something busy, but tastefully arranged.

For my added elements, I added a rocket, two screaming audience members (one of them is me — guess which) and some ‘extra’ text. This filled in the blank

Adding movie sugar

When designing for nostalgic effect, it pays not to be subtle. People need to recognise what card you’re pulling otherwise it looks sixty years out of date. I was a little worried about that with my poster so I added a few lines of ‘movie credit text’ in Univers Ultra Condensed and a big ‘Color by Technicolor’ to put it out there in a big way. Again, I stuck to slightly undersaturated colours and blocky fonts to keep it authentic.

The poster’s old…

So make it look old and printed. I added a few filters to give this effect. First, a really light Gaussian Blur and then noise to mud-up the contrast between colours. And voila… that’s it. You can view my final product at the top of the page!

A few Photoshop filters can add age to your new poster

Posted on July 1st, 2009 in Graphic Design | 1 Comment

G’day and welcome to my blog at Bad Blumau! If you’re reading this, you’re an early adopter and that can only be good, so keep reading and tell your mates!

For those that don’t know me (I reckon there would be a few), my name is Charlie Gearside. I’m nineteen years of age and have lived in Sydney, Australia my entire life. For about as long as that, design has been a part of my life too. It’s been a funny old relationship and something I want to discuss in more depth in future articles. My design persona is Bad Blumau, an agency I started as the next step in my commercial design experience. Read about it here.

It’s time for a brief history lesson, so I’ll start with the now and run backwards. As of today, I’m a student at the College of Fine Arts in Paddington, Sydney. For about four years (maybe more, maybe less) I’ll be studying a Bachelor of Design. In a few short months it’s inspired my to act on my love of design and create Bad Blumau. In short, I love the place and what it stands for.

View from the top of COFA Design building

That hasn’t always been so simple to understand. I was born into creativity, yet shunned it throughout my early teens. My father is a storyboard artist and painter. He was trained a very traditional way at an old art school that used to be near the racecourse in Randwick. He has worked everywhere from Hanna-Barbera as a key-framer to some of Sydney’s bigger advertising agencies. He’s now self-employed doing storyboard art and art direction.

From dad, I gathered drawing skills and an understanding of perspective and colour at a pretty young age. If I could pick the most important influence my parents have had on me, it would probably be a reasonable understanding of what’s tasteful; the subtleties of design and layout that cannot be made by adding elements upon elements. In saying that, I’ve still got a fair bit of learning to do.

Despite it being such a big part of my life, I decided to give Visual Arts a miss when I chose my subjects in Year 9 in 2004. I was really naive and thought that my choices then would impact my future career as a ‘money-maker’ (oh, how wrong can you be?). So there was me snubbing my underdeveloped nose at the subject I was best at and heading off down the path of such interesting subjects as Commerce and Elective History. In the famous words of Aqua, If only I could turrrrrrrn back tie-him.

That was the trend until the age of fifteen when I decided to do a bit of freelance graphic work. I was a car-nut and I managed to find a way to make graphic design and cars go together. Digital tuning. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s a real shame and something I will have to change with a nice long article about it all in the future. Basically I predicted what cars of the not-too-distant-future (think the next model ahead) would look like. I got in touch with the Sydney Morning Herald and got a freelance gig as an artists doing their predictions. I started CGI Automotive in 2005. It operated as both an agency and a popular car-prediction blog. For about two and a half years I got plenty of work through here and some of my work appeared overseas. Probably the highlight here was getting on the cover of America’s biggest-selling car magazine, Motor Trend.

An example of my virtual-tuning. Holden Monaro circa. 2006

What happened next? Well, even I couldn’t have predicted it.

Between 2007 and 2008, I got over cars. Nope. No reason. Just got over them. Where once I found myself scanning every vehicle on the road and subconciously matching their make and model with a special list of ‘good cars’ in my head, now I couldn’t give a stuff. If I could put it down to something, it would definitely be the year after school that changed me. A life-defining year.

That year started with me enrolling in a university course that I, within two months, would hate. It was a business-orientated technology at one of Sydney’s main universities and it sold itself. When I signed up for it I wondered why they were offering a considerable cash scholarship with it. Now I know. Without naming it, it was in my opinion poorly taught and — most importantly — not for me. I was not about numbers, I was about design. It was boring.

Part of the course conditions was that I work at a financial institute for half a year. I got a six-month internship at Macquarie Bank, one of the world’s largest and most successful investment banks. Though I was clearly not enjoying this period, I told myself that the experience of being chucked into the ‘deep end’ of full-time work would be good for me. It was. It was where I found my passion for web design.

Macquarie Bank's Martin Place office. I was on level 6.

I was put in a team of blokes in the Treasury and Commodities department that had a lot to do with the web. From July 2008 to Feburary 2009, I was learning almost everyday about HTML, CSS, JavaScript and more. For the first time in a year I saw a connection between my own creative interests and that of the web. I was fascinated. Sure, I’d run a few websites before but this was serious. I learnt more in my time amidst the cold greys of CBD Sydney that I ever had in a classroom or lecture hall.

So I quit that course, but not web design. If anything, ‘Club Mac’ was the beginning.

I started the Bachelor of Design at the College of Fine Arts in 2009. I started Bad Blumau a few weeks ago and here we are. Have a look at my portfolio and give me a yell if you want some work done. Until then, keep reading the blog. I’ll post a couple of times a week.

Posted on June 26th, 2009 in Design Life | No Comments