(Guest review by Daniel Gray)

As commercial art produced to sell another form of commercial art, film posters can often be crass, repetitive, disposable. They’re just adverts to convince you to sit in a dark room for a couple of hours, right? They’re all about big floating heads, questionable quotes from reviewers, mugging comedians accompanied by bold red text on white backgrounds, right?

Well mostly, yes. But, as with the films themselves, amidst all the dreck you’ll find the occasional poster that goes well beyond what is expected of it, a poster that deserves a life beyond the multiplex wall.

A lot of these one-sheet gems can be found in Art Of The Modern Movie Poster (Amazon US|CA|UK|DE), a sizeable tome that brings together the collections of a handful of experts (Judith Salavetz, Spencer Drate, and Sam Sarowitz). Structured by nationality (of the poster that is, not necessarily the films themselves), you can flick to any random page and find something to like.

It’s hard to open up a double-page spread of The Man Who Fell To Earth artwork without wanting to hang the whole darn book on your wall. This is where the book excels – with page after page of stunning images, it triumphs through sheer volume.

The problem is that alongside this eye-candy it would have been nice to read a bit more about the context of what you’re looking at. When it does offer some insight into the stories behind the posters – such as the few case studies scattered throughout – it leaves you wanting more. It’s not surprising to find an article on Saul Bass (accompanied by inevitably stunning, iconic work), but what about all those great poster designers who go uncelebrated?

The structure of the book does reveal some trends – the illustrative nature of Polish posters for Hollywood films, or the candy cartoonery of Japanese interpretations, for example – but this method of grouping merely seems to be a convenient way to frame the particular collections on show. The prolific film industries of India and Hong Kong are given just a couple of pages each. It almost feels like an auction catalogue.

Whereas Art Of The Modern Movie Poster takes a geographic approach to its content, Translating Hollywood (Amazon: US
|CA|UK|DE) opts for a chronological ordering (and is also accompanied by an index – something the former book, the much larger of the two, desperately needs).

Based on just one collection of posters (Sam Sarowitz again – many of the posters appear in both books), the title suggests the specific focus of the book – the translation and interpretation of artwork for different audiences. Rather than finding posters for the same film pages apart, Sarowitz groups two or three different versions on a spread, and then offers some commentary on what you’re looking at.

Without exception, this structure exposes fascinating juxtapositions. The philosophical staring-into-space, sitting about-ness of the American Cool Hand Luke poster gives way to a Japanese version dominated by the promise of sex and violence; Army Of Darkness turns from knowing heroic imagery to multicoloured pop-art (complete with Warholian cans of Bruce Campbell soup); and The Big Lebowski, well, The Big Lebowski is going to be a crazy poster no matter what language it’s in:

Both books offer plenty in the way of eye candy, but Translating Hollywood benefits hugely from actually having a central thesis. Both, however, suffer a little from their origins in dealers’ collections. When viewed as works of standalone art, as valuable artifacts in their own right, rather than their original purpose – adverts – their meaning changes. We see very little of posters from the last fifteen years, presumably because they are not yet of any great monetary value, so no modern classics like Funny Games or Lost In Translation (which would seem rather appropriate here) to bring things up to date.

This is a shame, because there is no connection to how the marketing role of film posters has changed with new technologies. You’re just as likely to see a “poster” (those quote marks becoming ever more necessary) on the Internet, linking to a trailer or a review, as you are on a bus stop. So perhaps these books are best viewed as retrospectives of an era of printed marketing, a system facing a radical shift in purpose.

If you want a dip-in coffee table book, go for Art Of The Modern Movie Poster. For a more eye-opening read, one that has something to say about the increasingly international nature of design, go for Translating Hollywood. Just don’t expect to learn much about the art of today’s film posters.

Art Of The Modern Movie Poster

Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

Translating Hollywood – The World Of Movie Posters

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

You can buy Art Of The Modern Movie Poster from Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) and Translating Hollywood also from Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE). Both are available in The Designer’s Review of Books store.

About The Reviewer

Daniel Gray is a graphic designer living and working in York. He also writes the blog Binky the doormat and manages the Flickr group The Face (1980-2004). His favourite movie poster is the orange squiggly Cool Hand Luke one.

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What makes a good ad? What makes an award-winning creative idea? These days its easy to get distracted by fancy art direction and technological novelties, but when you strip all that away, does the idea still stand up?

This is the essence of Pete Barry’s The Advertising Concept Book (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) in which you won’t see a single glossy image. No 3D, no photography, no screenshots, just pencil sketches and thumbnails. Sketches are still a staple of the process of developing concepts and pitches in everything from interaction and product design through to classic above-the-line advertising, which is what the book focuses on.

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“This way, the work is judged by its content, not by its cover. And in terms of my own work, I’d rather have a portfolio of brilliant-thinking roughs than brilliant-looking duffs. Showing fifty years’ worth of rough comps not only helps teachers to explain why an “old” ad is still a great ad, but it also forces students to think now and design later, hence reversing their initial temptation to grab a computer instead of a pencil.”

As someone who teaches interactive media and has run a digital media programme, this gets the biggest of big cheers from me. Learning how to use the tools is important, but not at the expense of the idea. Coming up with ideas and putting your creativity up for criticism isn’t easy. Sometimes it can be soul destroying. But it is part of the process in whatever creative field you are working in.

Over my own years of teaching I have observed two reasons why students cling to the software. The first is that they often mistakenly think it is what will make them money when they leave. That’s true to a certain extent, but there are thousands of other people out there who know how to use Photoshop just as there are millions who can use a pencil. In fact, many people can use Photoshop spectacularly badly.

The second reason is because software skills are something solid and graspable whilst personal, creative development is mushy and scary. It need not be software – there are plenty of people obsessing over the perfect lens or sketchbook. When it feels like you have no ideas and are creatively all at sea, that filter menu in Photoshop looks like an attractive lifebelt, but it can just as easily be a lead weight.

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The Advertising Concept Book is designed primarily for students (and teachers) and provides a well-structured and complete course on advertising, including several exercises that students can try. The book works through the entire process from basic tools, to strategy and campaign executions across all media – print, TV, ambient, interactive, radio and integrated campaigns.

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Saying the book is for students is selling it short. Given some of the terrible advertising that bombards my poor eyeballs every day, there are plenty of advertising and marketing professionals that would get a great deal out of this book. Every new recruit should be given a copy as part of their induction process, perhaps then we’d see some improvement.

“Over time you will become critical of many ads, even awards winners [...] Once you start to look at ads properly, it won’t be long before you’ll be wincing with embarrassment as you look back at the ads that you thought were good.”

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Although Barry describes the various roles in advertising, he avoids prioritising art direction or copywriting and points out that this partnership is a blend of skills that overlap and complement each other to create the best ideas. The “think now, design now” mantra remains a consistent focus throughout the book.

The Advertising Concept Book takes all the best parts of fifty years’ worth of awards annuals and, along with the rough comps, adds Barry’s accompanying wisdom, which is both engaging and enlightening. His years of experience – first as an art director at Ogilvy in London and since 2000 as a copywriter in New York and a teacher at Syracuse University – have not gone to waste.

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My father had an advertising agency for many years, which left me pretty cynical about the industry. Yet, I found the book much more engaging than I expected and read it in detail from cover to cover. Some of the approaches to generating ideas have helped me with some recent small projects and certainly sharpened my own creative thinking.

If there is a criticism it is that is that the less classical advertising areas (such as interactive) don’t go into as much detail as I would have liked. This is probably a little unfair because Barry makes it clear from the start that the book is really about straight advertising and I’m being picky because interactive is my own area. (Actually a piece of work for Levi’s by Antirom appears in the book, so I can’t complain).

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If you’re a student you should definitely steal buy this book and if you are involved in teaching design and media, you should buy three copies, one for you and two for your institution’s library. If you are a professional in advertising and are wondering why you haven’t yet won any awards, buy The Advertising Concept Book and you might find out why.

Rating: ★★★★½ 

You can support The Designer’s Review of Books by buying The Advertising Concept Book from Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) or The Designer’s Review of Books store.

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Before motion graphics there was broadcast graphic design and before that title design for film. It is a vibrant area of design that has remained strangely undocumented. Most designers will know of the legendary Saul Bass, but many other title designers remain unknown.

Uncredited: Graphic Design & Opening Titles in Movies by Gemma Solana and Antonio Boneu, published by Index Book, lays claim to being “the first book to give a general and historic insight into the role which graphic design plays in films”. The name of the book is taken from the early days of cinema when title designers remained uncredited often up until the 1970s.

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With such a goldmine of design classics from which to draw upon Uncredited, in the words of Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, “could have been a contender”. Unfortunately, the book’s content is completely overshadowed by some sloppy production and translation.

As an Englishman living in Germany, I have deep respect for anyone who works in a language other than their mother tongue. I can read and write German reasonably fluently, but I would never dream of publishing a book in my own poorly-crafted German – I value the written word too much. The English version of Uncredited needed a thorough edit by a native English speaker.

The limited use of adjectives means that every other title critique is a “perfect execution from a master” and the flow of the text feels like a Google translation. It is much like riding a road racing bike up a rocky mountain path – it is possible and you can reach your destination, but it is a bumpy and unpleasant ride.

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I would have really liked to have seen one or two decent interviews with living title designers such as Kyle Cooper, the designer of the titles for Se7en rather than quoted snippets from other interviews too. Pretty soon I found myself stopping reading and looking around at the scenery of the pictures before forcing myself back into reading the text.

The writing is such a shame, because it really gets in the way of enjoying what should have been an insightful commentary on the history of what eventually turned into the often stunning motion graphics industry we have today. I have not seen the Spanish original and have no idea if it reads as badly in Spanish, but if you can read Spanish I suspect it is the better option. I would be grateful if a Spanish reader would let us know in the comments.

The other aspect of the book that is sloppy is the physical production. It may have just been my review copy, but the titles running down the side of the pages are very tightly cropped, sometimes cropped off completely.

Other plates seemed to have slipped registrations or guillotining and occasionally the page title unforgivably runs over the top of the sequence of images. If it was an attempt at a bit of Carsonesque Ray Gun style it did not go far enough. My guess is that these are errors that should have been caught before the final print run. For a book about design, this is disappointing to see.

[UPDATE: Index Book wrote to say that, "The layout of the book was commissioned to the highly awarded, prestigious Argentinian, Barcelona-based designer Mario Eskenazi whose intention was to create a static credit sequence effect by allowing the texts to slip off the side of the pages and on top of images. It is a daring design but intentional, nevertheless." I'm pleased that is clarified, but still feel it wasn't nearly daring enough, laying it open to the interpretation of accidental misalignment. And running the type sloppily over the title images was ill-conceived.]

The images in the book are limited to smallish thumbnail sequences in order to show the flow and motion of the title. Given that they are film titles at film resolution, it would have been possible (though perhaps expensive) to procure a larger images to see the detail. Never mind, I thought, I shall sit back and enjoy the included DVD in all its MPEG 2 glory. Alas, the DVD is actually a DVD ROM with folders of 320px x 240px QuickTime movies. That was the end of a series of disappointments from a book that I was really looking forward to reviewing.

So, what is good about Uncredited? It is a great collection of title sequences and the authors have done a good job of searching through the archives and trying to track down the names of the original designers (and many are, indeed, uncredited).

There are many beautiful titles that I had not seen before and plenty of relatively recent ones that I had forgotten about such as Kuntzel and Deygas’s titles for Catch Me If You Can. If you can read through the lumpy writing, there is also some interesting information about the history of title design and, of course, the key designers in the area beyond Saul Bass.

However, If you actually want to view some decent images and videos of title sequences, I recommend subscribing to the (unrelated) Art of the Title Sequence web site, which I have linked to for all the titles in this review. They frequently have HD versions of the titles and sometimes added extras, such as Walter Murch talking about his sound mix for the titles of The Conversation.

Plus you can view one of the grave omissions from Uncredited – Michael Riley’s beautiful macro titles for Gattaca.

Rating: ★½☆☆☆ 

Index Book requested that readers Uncredited: Graphic Design & Opening Titles in Movies from their online store directly, but if you search in the The Designer’s Review of Books store, you might find that Amazon sell it too.

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The Little Know-It-All from Gestalten is either a desk reference or a toilet book, depending on your reading preferences.

With the tag-line of “Common Sense for Designers” it’s a book full of all the things you didn’t bother to pay attention to in design school and wish you had. Forgotten your colour theory? Can’t remember paper sizes? Don’t know your flexo from your gravure printing? This is the book for you.

The Little Know-It-All is pretty much aimed at graphic – or perhaps more accurately, visual – designers and is divided into seven main sections: design, typography, digital media, production, marketing, law and organisation. At times the level of details feels unnecessary such as the anatomical cross-section of the eyeball whilst explaining perspective, for example. In other areas it skims over huge subjects – usability gets just under a page.

In fairness to the editors it must have been difficult know what to leave in and what to cut out. Covering the entire design world in 350 pages including notes and index pages can’t have been easy.

The original, Der kleine Besserwisser, is in German and there is certainly a very Bauhaus approach underlying the design fundamentals sections. (Incidentally, the book is also available in Spanish as El peque̱o sabelotodo by Index Book). The introductions to the chapters are fairly chatty but the text soon gets into no-nonsense information, in quite a German manner. I quite like this РI live in Germany after all Рbut it might feel a bit austere to some. The upside of these German origins is that the chapter on typography is by ex-Linotype MD, Bruno Steinert.

In terms of production, the book is stitch-bound with a ribbon bookmark and a flexible plastic cover, similar to the pocket dictionaries I remember from school. That means it’s not going to fall apart soon and you can spill coffee on it without too much worry.

The sections on planning and organisation will be useful to many non-designers and students. There is a gem of a English proofing error in the Eight Golden Rules of the Planning Process – the first rule says “Plann in adavance” [sic]. Oops! Good job that wasn’t in the section on proofing.

The copyright and legal information is as snooze-inducing as it was when I was at college, but it’s the kind of thing that is very useful to have at your fingertips when a client relationship is starting to go awry and you need the details. Let’s face it, copyright law is important but deeply dull to read. (The legal info is also somewhat European and Germany biased – it would be impossible to cover every country’s laws of course).

The digital media section feels a little lightweight, but that’s my own discipline area and I suspect everyone will feel their own area of expertise has been skimmed too much.

The question, then, is who, would use this book given the large amount of information just a Google away? The answer is that there three ways to think about this book.

The first is that it is an ideal book for design/design management students and teachers. There is a good first year or so of design school between the covers.

The second is that it’s the kind of book a professional would leave on their desk for all the things that are not their specialist discipline. Plenty of web designers occasionally have to do a print or motion graphics job and vice versa. It’s been on my desk for a few months and many times I have found it quicker and more pleasant to look up a fact in The Little Know-It-All instead of Googling around for it.

The third is that it is a book that should live amongst the reading material in the toilet (washroom, if you’re feeling sensitive) of any design studio. It is a kind of design equivalent to books like Schott’s Original Miscellany. If you are a toilet reader, you’ll be able to impress your workmates with all sorts of design trivia. It will also make a good Christmas present for the designer in your life.

Appropriately enough, a less polite version of “Besserwisser” in German is a “Klugscheißer” or, literally, “clever shitter”.

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de or the DRB Store. (You can buy the Spanish version direct from Index Book.)

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