The Swimmer (1968)
An alternative redesign for one of my very favourite films. I had a dream about this image. So I made it. Sometimes you have to do things for no other reason than clearing some space in your head.
Key Art
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Nice Work #3
The Social Network, Neil Kellerhouse, 2010
In advertising I don’t think you can be disingenuous at all. With social media and the speed of communication you have to be really honest and up front about what you have with your property and be true to the story. So it’s all that and then trying to figure out an interesting and compelling way to communicate that. And that’s the hard part.
Neil Kellerhouse, interviewed by IndieWireI’m self-taught. An autodidact, if you want to get fancy and sound like being self-taught is a good thing. And being an autodidact has its advantages, sure. But it also means I have really weird gaps in my knowledge. In certain areas, I’m a numbskull. Typography is the big one. Graphic designers are supposed to be typography totalitarians. But for me, as long as it answers a few questions - Is it legible? Does it add to comprehension? Does it feel right? – then it’s done. I know. I know that if I ever want to be a proper graphic designer, then I’ve got to sit the fuck down and read a book about typography. And very occasionally I diligently open a ‘beginning typography’ book and I’m asleep in about five seconds because it’s the most boring thing in the world. Reading about typography is like printed instructions for dancing, to entirely misappropriate Stephin Merritt. But even a typographical philistine like me knows great typography when he sees it. Neil Kellerhouse is brilliant at a heck of a lot of stuff, but he is really, really great with typography. The tricks he can do with type would make a $500 hooker blush. In particular check out his range of designs for Steven Soderbergh, a body of typographic work as far-ranging and eclectic as the films themselves:
The typography for The Social Network is really simple and really divine. It’s a bugbear of mine when bad designers try to justify text in short line widths, because it often obfuscates the meaning of the sentence. And here it’s close, it’s really close (“A FEW”), but he gets away with it because he understands the rhythm of the statement and the beat of the language and how to express it clearly and simply and in sympathy with the image behind it.
Just look at that tagline. That’s the sort of tagline that only comes up once in your career, and it’s perfect. It makes a film about Facebook – and think about that hideous idea, for a moment – sound like a noir thriller. Suddenly the notion of watching a film about a kind of dull young man who had a good idea sitting at a computer is one worth investigating.
When we first wrote that line it was “300 million friends” and I said, “let’s just make it 500 million.” That was December ’09, we had that poster pretty much nailed down for an October 2010 release and [I said] we’re just going to go for it and get 500millionfriends.com and see if it gets there. At the time we decided to go with [that tagline] it seemed a little bit ambitious because there was all those privacy issues going on. So I thought people would be abandoning ship on Facebook, so we got 400millionfriends.com just in case. We were really hedging our bets.
ibidThe tagline here is the poster. Or at least, it’s the hook. Plastering text (very) artfully over the shot of Jesse Eisenberg is a bit of a Kellerhouse trademark move, or at least as much as he can be said to have one.
I don’t think it’s his best typography (that would be the fractured Didot for I’m Still Here) and I don’t even think it’s his best plastering-typography-over-the-protagonist’s-face artwork (that would be the head-slappingly concise Man Who Fell To Earth cover for Criterion) but the purity of the concept here is just amazing: Step back and look at it. Take it in. This is what every client who wants to replicate this poster for their film misses, and it’s so pure and so obvious that it can skate under you without your noticing:
This is ‘Mark Zuckerberg”s profile picture.
That, very simply, is why this image works. That is why, when every client under the sun spent all of 2011 asking for ‘a Social Network-style poster’, it never worked. Without any words, and I would wager even without that blue bar on the right hand side, it’s because of that image that you know that this film is a portrait of the guy that made Facebook. And that, basically, is all you need to know about the film. Do you need to know it’s by Aaron Sorkin? Do you need to know that David Fincher is directing? If you’re the sort of person who needs to know that stuff then you know that stuff already. If not, well, there’s the web address, in the web address box. These days (and often on this site) folks are going nutso for minimalist poster design, but honestly it doesn’t get more minimal than this – no actor headlines, no credit block, no reviews or quotes or four-and-a-half-stars from whoever.
And even a numbskull like me can appreciate that.
You can view his online folio here.
Coming up:
Crocodile Dundee, and leaving ‘Polish design’ to the Poles
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Noise: Make Australia Beautiful
Live and Let Die and the work of Robert McGinnis
Violent CopNice Work #2
Rosemary’s Baby, by Stephen Frankfurt, 1968
Ah, here we are. A bona fide classic, by a bona fide advertising guy.
Or maybe not. Let’s just acknowledge this so it can be got out of the way at the beginning: Steve Frankfurt is credited as the creative director for this work. The work fell under his aegis and so, while acknowledging that many of the ‘Frankfurt’ designs were the work of Phillip Gips, or at least a collaboration between the two – and possibly also Aubrey Balkind – I’m going to have to attribute this design to him. Success, as we all know, has many fathers (and in the case of the Alien tagline, at least one mother). And other than watching Mad Men I have not the slightest idea how an ad agency actually works, let alone a specific agency forty years ago, so I have nothing to offer on the particulars of ‘ownership’.
(Aside, squared: imagine what it’s going to be like for future key art historians, now that many designs are a grab-bag of elements from a number of different shops crudely scotch-taped together by whichever place charges the least for finishing.)
Every modern bio of Frankfurt contains a line to the effect that he was some kind of proto-Don Draper – a proper ad guy, at a time when ad guys were the guys to be. His approach to movie marketing was revolutionary – he would design the key art, the trailer, the press ads and the title sequence as one unified piece. Saul Bass, of course, had also been working along these lines for some time, but Bass’s idiosyncratic work was as much a stylistic choice for the project rather than purely in service to the project – Frankfurt’s work is by contrast more ‘of the piece’ – strong, emblematic of the film and slick as brylcreem through a pocket comb. If Bass took movie advertising closer to art, then Frankfurt brought key art closer to advertising. Perhaps for the first time, film advertising became as smart and stylish as advertising elsewhere: it’s practically impossible to view the Rosemary’s Baby key art, for instance, without thinking of the Volkswagen ads that were prevalent throughout the mid to late sixties.
Rosemary’s Baby is a by-the-books things-that-go-bump-in-the-uterus genre flick elevated somewhat by Polanski’s firm grounding of the film in the real world (or at least a real world where people live in the Dakota and get their hair styled by Vidal Sassoon) and the solid performance of Farrow in the title role (Cassavetes spends most of the film waiting for his pay cheque so he can go and make Faces). Robert Evans claims in The Kid Stays in the Picture that he always wanted “the little Polack” to direct the film as soon as he read the book. It’s a typically inspired choice, of a piece with Polanski’s other terrors of city living, Repulsion and The Tenant. But let’s not overburden the film - it’s basically a silly piece of Crowley-froth – and to its credit that’s something the key art doesn’t shy away from. The brimstone-and-sulphur green overlay, the craggy, hellish outcrop (apparently Central Park) is all delightfully over the top. The genius tagline “Pray for Rosemary’s Baby” (oddly, included in all the advertising except this onesheet) is pure shlock – add some italics and an exclamation point and it’s the 1950s all over again. But the thing that makes this artwork special is the bravery of it – look at the image again. It’s entirely uncluttered by text. Visualising the poster before I wrote this I had transplanted the cast and title into the black and reversed it out, but here it is – an acre of menacing black space crushing the title into an area that these days wouldn’t fit the logos of the production. There’s a confidence here in the unsaid, and the classic adman’s art of the tease in full effect. What we aren’t seeing is more important than what we are – a lesson most key art would benefit from.
Success has many fathers, but it also has many followers. Clients and designers alike are never shy of attempting to replicate success (something I’ll be discussing next week). For instance, this may be the first example of the big actor head hovering over a silhouetted landscape, a trend that 45 years later is still in full swing. Shortly thereafter a number of other designs bearing marked similarities to this art started to appear, not least of which was Frankfurt’s (or Gips’) own Downhill Racer, the following year – essentially the same trick, pulled twice, receiving a standing ovation both times.
More Steve Frankfurt: There’s a great contemporary BBC documentary about him from the Young & Rubicam days here.
Coming up:
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Next: The Social Network and the perils of success
Crocodile Dundee, and leaving ‘Polish design’ to the Poles
Noise: Make Australia Beautiful
Live and Let Die and the work of Robert McGinnisNice Work #1
Nordeste, designed by Egil Haraldsen, 2005
“Generally I would say that there are too many designers who follow the international trends rather than think for themselves. Of course, society needs more aesthetes. I will be happy to be a politically independent Minister of Taste for future governments – and I shall have unlimited power, a large screen and be allowed to smoke in the office.” ¹
I first became aware of the work of Egil Haraldsen in 2005 when the producer John Maynard proudly thrust the Norwegian artwork for Look Both Ways under my nose with a flourish. “Now that’s a poster, mate,” he said. And he was right. Compared to the design I’d overseen for the same film the previous year it was full of intent, movement and style. As a bonus, you could actually see what was going on, and that it was a film with people in it. It was a huge improvement, I had to grudgingly admit.
(An aside: A few years later, Maynard drew upon Haraldsen’s services for the My Year Without Sex key art. Not my favourite piece of his, but as a visual representation of Sarah Watt’s surely-wilfully-ugly depiction of chaotic domesticity it’s pretty much on the button. “He’s a lot easier to work with than you mate,” was Maynard’s ebullient summation of the process. His promise to “just give Egil a ring” tends to get regularly wheeled out with a grin when I fail to immediately produce an award-winning first draft on anything we work on together.)
Throughout his career Haraldsen has worked mainly a book designer, although he has produced an enormous volume of work (over 100 pieces) for the Norwegian film distributor Arthaus. His work for them is instantly recognisable as part of a continuing whole, each film maintaining its own identity but seamlessly fitting into the overall grand design.
It’s a general rule of effective key art to maintain some respect for the aesthetics of the film in the design, although the common interpretation of that rule is a lot more literal than Haraldsen’s, and this is where his focus as a book designer is absolutely apparent. Not just because his designs ignore convention, but rather that the visual aesthetic does not appear to be the most important aspect for him to express. By necessity, working on visual solutions for books lends itself to more interpretive and inventive presentation of the content, rather than the lazily literal nature of working in the service of a visual medium. And it’s this ethos that Haraldsen brings to his work.
I love that his sense of proportion feels bracingly pedantic (although he claims to not think of the grid or the golden proportion when he works, blaming instead a “classical art education and years [of] experience”) but what is overlaid on this solid foundation is often dizzying in its lack of respect for the status quo. Huge negative spaces command the eye, while free-floating images crash into each other, splintering and breaking across copy and art.
The designs have an astonishing vigour to them – the collage of elements chopped and dropped with seeming abandon to produce something startling and unexpected. There’s definitely a touch of David Carson and Neville Brody in there too; how could there not be, with the incredible typographic confidence on display – multi-layered, chopped-up, obstructed text confusing and informing in equal measure. And the billing blocks! The tiny, wonderful, screw-the-film-poster-rhetoric billing blocks.I love them.
Finding just one piece to pull out of such an amazing portfolio was almost impossible; I’d have been happy to use any of these images as the featured piece. But the Nordeste artwork is such a complete summation of Haraldsen’s style: the negative space, the unusual cropping, the rigid structure and the chaotic collage – it’s all there, wonderfully expressive and inviting. And after all, that’s its job. And I remember seeing this design above all the others (well this and maybe the artwork for Sztuczki, above ) and being fascinated by it. How was it possible to design such a thing? How did all those decisions get made? What were the reasons behind them? Where the hell were the sort of clients that would not only encourage this kind of design, but actually use it? How much was a flight to Oslo?
Even in the few years since I first became mesmerized with these questions, the wider industry has come some way towards reconciling itself with the work of Egil Haraldsen. You can see it most clearly in Eric Skillman and Sarah Habibi’s Criterion Collection designs, always at the vanguard of interpretation. But even outside of Mount Olympus, things are slowly and surely progressing. Boundaries are being pushed and new ideas are slipping through the net every day.
Of course there is a general acceptance of very poor work throughout the business: lazy steals, pre-chewed slop, tired template trash. But slowly and subtly, year on year, a creeping bravery is starting to take hold at the fringes. Clients are less and less dismissive of designs that even five years ago they would have baulked at.
Note ‘less dismissive’ rather than ‘accepting’, or ‘happy’. We still have a long way to go yet, most of us.
Coming up:
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Next: Steve Frankfurt and Rosemary’s Baby
The Social Network and the perils of success
Crocodile Dundee, and leaving Polish design to the Poles
Noise: Make Australia BeautifulCoral: Rekindling Venus
This is the key art – or rather, these are the key art – for Lynette Wallworth’s new work Coral: Rekindling Venus which is a video work designed solely for fulldome planetarium. It was quite a challenge to represent a circular, full field-of-vision immersion onto a 27×41 canvas. So I took a different tack. It’s an astonishing, otherworldly experience that should knock any preconceptions you have about video art squarely in the chops, and as such is highly recommended if you have a planetarium nearby.
+ Read more…Despite the Gods
This is a pretty interesting film about filmmaking, spiritual journeys and cultural differences (and especially cultural differences to filmmaking as a spiritual journey). I didn’t realise Jennifer Lynch was only 19 when she did (the much underrated) Boxing Helena. Imagine being at the centre of that shitstorm, with all the pressure that would come with being the daughter of the pre-eminent American filmmaker of his generation.Then imagine how it would have been at 19. So I thought at the very least she deserved some devotional art :)
+ Read more…The Assassination of Richard Nixon
January 17, 2011 | Posted By: Jem | Unused Key Art |
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Making Samson & Delilah
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Just in case you were in any doubt as to whether these kids can act or not.
Client: Scarlett PicturesHesher (Sundance)
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Sadly I do not know who the illustration was done by, it’s really amazing – I can’t claim credit, I just did some editing and turned it into a poster. After careful consideration I decided that this should really be seen, rather than not seen, and my site is as good a place as any to show it.The Motorcycle Diaries aka Diarios de Motocicleta
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© Dendy Films. Reproduced with permission.Gettin’ Square
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Client: Jonathan Teplitzky / Mushroom Pictures / WTA / Maquarie Nine / Freshwater Films
