THE POSTER BOYS

In catching up on blog updates, I realized I hadn't yet announced the start of my new design podcast with my colleague Brandon Schaefer, The Poster Boys. We're four episodes into a series of long and casual conversations about important poster artists, designers, and movements in graphic design history.  The hub for The Poster Boys is our Tumblr page, theposterboys.tumblr.com, where we attempt to solve the problem of making a visual topic aurally stimulating by showing you the images and posters we're talking about, all in one tidy and chronological spot. Check it out and follow us.

Posters by Brandon Schaefer 

As Brandon and I both design movie posters, our conversations naturally veer into this area as we discuss the challenges and rewards of working in that particular industry. Brandon and I met designing movie posters online for fun and have remained friends since as we both moved into the world of professional design. You can see his great work at seekandspeak.com.

Our first topic was an obvious choice: Saul Bass, legendary designer of movie posters, title sequences, and short films. Such a towering figure of design that we had to take two full episodes to stretch out the conversation (hear Part One here, and Part Two here). We discuss his work with logos and corporate branding, his film icons and posters, his industrial films, his artistic collaborators, and his philosophy about what makes good design.

Episode Three looked at a different kind of movie poster legend: painter Drew Struzan. Anyone of my generation knows Struzan's work from a variety of 80's and 90's adventure posters that adorned the theater halls of their childhood, including his iconic work on the Back to the Future, Indiana Jones, and Star Wars films (we saved Star Wars for a special "galaxy far far away" episode coming later this year).

In Episode Four, we switched gears to less of a household name, but one that we hope will be known by all budding designers: Bob Gill. Gill outlines a concise, refreshing, and potentially game-changing philosophy of design problem solving in his various books and talks, and we celebrate his rules and vocabulary in this episode. Each episode we also open up "The Flat File" to look at the posters for a particular film that were produced by different designers and artists around the world for various purposes, and here we have a particularly interesting and sobering example of the artist's eternal struggle with the marketing machine.

Which brings us to Episode Five, coming later this month, on the Polish Poster School. It's a mammoth topic, and I'm sure we'll only just scratch the surface of this influential movement in design, where Polish artists and designers of the 40's and 50's worked through the post-war social realist era and gave birth to an entirely new and daring language of film poster design. I'll be sure to post again when this episode is up, and you can click around on my blog here (or use the Categories section on the right) to find a whole slew of Polish poster posts.

To keep up with what we're doing, subscribe here on iTunes, and if you can, leave a rating and/or review to help us reach a wider audience. And keep your browser aimed at theposterboys.tumblr.com where you can listen to episodes and view all relevant and related visual materials for the episodes. We're also on Twitter at @PosterBoysShow and on Facebook as well. Have a listen, stay in touch, and let us know what you think.

TY I JA

An art book devoted to the pages of Polish magazine Ty i Ja would make for an interesting look at Polish culture in the 60's, and a companion to the newfound micro-academia surrounding the poster art of the Polish poster school. Founded in 1959, the monthly magazine celebrated all facets of culture from poetry and literature to theatre and film. Legendary poster designers like Roman Cieslewicz and Eryk Lipinski contributed cover and interior designs regularly, and Cieslewicz served as art director there for its first three years.

This month, my new design podcast with Brandon Schaefer, The Poster Boys, will dig into the art and politics of the Polish poster school. Until we record, I'm basking in as much research as possible, and couldn't forget to share these Ty i Ja covers, several of which come respectfully from Savanah Design.

Pictogram also shows off a remarkable collection of advertisements from Ty i Ja here that are must-sees.

While I'm at it, I'll go ahead and collect here all of my other posts on Polish graphic design. Check them out if interested:

POLAND MAGAZINE

ERYK LIPINSKI

WALDEMAR SWIERZY

JERZY FLISAK

JAKUB EROL

1000 POLISH BOOK COVERS

5 POLISH BOOK COVERS

MY POLAND BOOK COVER

  

  

JAKUB EROL

Jakub Erol's Polish posters had it all. Surreal illustrated portraits of transformed heads and hands, creative photograph treatments, colorful cartoon drawings, you name it. He's one of the Polish poster artists you can't necessarily pin down to one recognizable style. But when you see an Erol poster, you know it's an Erol poster. Here are some of my favorites, starting with the above poster for WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S, a combination of type and image so interesting that it became one of the first Polish posters I added to my collection. Erol's work is certain to please 80's movie lovers, with his striking designs for THE TERMINATOR, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and MY STEPMOTHER IS AN ALIEN (another personal favorite), all seen below. See more at Terry Posters.

TOP 10 POSTERS / ELENA PROCESS

I almost forgot! Adrian Curry, my awesome art director on the ELENA poster, also happens to curate the great Movie Poster of the Week column at MUBI, and he recently shared some of my process sketches from ELENA and as a bonus asked me to select my ten favorite movie posters. A really fun list to put together. You can read it here.

LIPINSKI

Erik Lipinski is one of my favorite Polish poster artists. Born in 1908, Lipinski was the co-founder and editor of the Polish political magazine Spilki (Pins), whose excellent covers I've only seen in my Graphis annuals. Lipinski worked with the antinazi resistance in World War II and spent time imprisoned at Auschwitz. His wife, "Ha-Ga," was a prolific cartoonist featured in Spikli, and his son Tomek is a well-known Polish punk rocker. Here are a few of my favorite Lipinski designs.

Process: SOLARIS

SOLARIS is being released today by The Criterion Collection in a new transfer on Blu-ray and DVD. I was honored to be asked to work on a new cover and package design for it; a dream-come-true assignment. Criterion didn't give me any major restrictions in re-visualizing Tarkovsky's science-fiction masterpiece, but an existing cover had grown stale and they wanted something fresh for the film's birth on Blu-ray. We looked at the fantastic Polish poster designed by Andrzej Bertrandt and loved its abstract futuristic imagery and its title treatment. But I also felt that this poster, and many others that had been made for the film, all but ignored the humanity and psychology of the film as it relates to its protagonist Kris and his lost wife Hari who lives in his memory and, it appears, on the space station orbiting the mysterious planet Solaris. This is the core of Tarkovsky's film, and what separates it from so many other classic science fiction films, and we wanted to focus on this while remaining open to other visual possibilities. And I loved the idea of making Hari, rather than Kris (the protagonist), the icon for the re-design.

The first step in the design process is always to watch or re-watch the film. Solaris is a film I had already spent a good amount of time with, a film that has only grown more interesting each time I've seen it. Watching it again from a design perspective, I took notes on themes, concepts and imagery that I wanted to focus on and frame grabs that I might want to use, and also revisited some of his other films, interviews and commentaries just to sink myself into the world of Tarkovsky. My instinct was to start with a few key visual ideas and explore from there: Hari (a haunting shot from her entrance into the film seemed like it would work as a striking icon), an ocean background (nature is an important character in Solaris and I wanted to focus on this), a circular motif suggesting both the planet and a psychological hole/portal, and a hand-written title treatment representing the film's humanity over the cold, clean aesthetic associated with most science-fiction films. Many variations followed:

While we let those ideas sink in, I continued to run with some other rough ideas and experiments, throwing everything to the wall and seeing what stuck. With a film as visually rich as this, it was easy to be inspired and play, and I knew that it was going to take a lot of exploration to arrive at the perfect cover.

These below incorporate a photograph I had taken of a wet and rusty metal dish at my dad's house in the country; I thought it would make for a great planet icon. These were a bit thin conceptually, not really tapping into the humanity I wanted to convey, but I'm fond of them from a purely graphic standpoint.

Above, another purely graphic approach using the rusted dish. Inspired constantly by the great Czech and Polish poster artists, I always like trying messy, abstract concepts that don't use any film imagery at all, just to see if they might work, to see how abstract a cover we could possibly get away with. But for a film photographed this beautifully, it was a hard thought to forgo any actual images from the film in the design; some kind of photo montage was feeling like the best possible tribute we could pay to the beauty of the film. Next came a few more experiments trying a Futura title treatment and a Kris-centric cover:

With all of these covers thrown about the virtual table, the image that Criterion wanted me to come back to and work with was of the ghostly Hari, and they liked this comp in which I flipped an image from the film upside down, switching the assumed roles of the pictured reflection in the water and the actual photographed embankment. Reflection being such a huge theme in the film, this made sense to me as a visual trick and I liked the haunting quality of the reflected trees fading up and melting away into the space above:

Meanwhile, with a cover moving in this direction we thought a more genre-specific title treatment might make sense. I made an original title treatment that would serve as a kind of rebranded logo. I also thought it would also look nice reflected under itself, on top of whatever background we had to work with. I threw together a few simple cover concepts to try the new title treatment, including a simple-as-it-gets "planet in outer space" concept that checked-in with those original Polish posters. These also demonstrate a fixation I was enjoying with a contrast between a black-and-white background (representing Earth/nature) and a circular planet/gateway filled with color.

Switching back to the "reflection" comp... the colors in this framegrab came across as too dull and murky, and with the dark shadow of Hari this was starting to look like just a dreary ghost story. It was suggested that I try to incorporate some of the planet's vivid colors that we see in the film's later sequences, which led me to a comp that would be closer to our final cover but still not right, looking a bit hellish:

I went to another film still that would provide some nice reflected imagery and came up with this comp that I still like, but that seemed a little too busy. Here I also started to lighten Hari's face to bring some humanity to the image rather than just a ghostly shadow. At this point you can see the final cover taking shape comp by comp...

From here I returned to one of the first stills I worked with and the first comp I came up with. I applied the flipped-reflection treatment to that ocean still, along with a complete color-overhaul that encompassed a larger spectrum of the planet's look. This image of Solaris' ocean is one of the most beautiful in the film and from the beginning had such potential; flipping it upside down provided a thematic and visual solution (creating negative space for Hari at the top and center of the frame), and after trying so many things in other comps, I was able to return to this background image, apply what I'd learned, add the new title treatment, and finish it up. The approved final cover achieves what we were hoping for-- an elegant and seductive re-design that paid tribute to the psychology and visual beauty of Tarkovsky's film-- and hopefully it does it justice.

The rest of the package was a joy to assemble. Without any pressure to over-design Solaris as a sci-fi movie, I simply plucked the images that I love and seemed strongest thematically, and let Tarkovsky's own visual beauty do most of the work. My goal was for the package and menus to feel elegant, human, and warm. Here are a few peeks at how the booklet and DVD menus ended up looking:

Thanks for reading, and thanks of course to everyone at Criterion for this dream assignment. And I hope anyone reading this will enjoy discovering or re-discovering this sci-fi classic by one of the world's master filmmakers, another of which is coming just around the corner from Janus Films...