ABSTRACT

This chapter looks at how different kinds of posters are put together, from Victorian times to the present day. The huge explosion of typographic design in the 19th century gave poster designers a vast new range of fonts to work with. Some were bold some delicate, some playful; the choice was immense.Printers would buy in sets of typefaces at set display sizes, and frequently they wouldn’t own more than one or two sizes of a particular font. The 1950s may have been Hollywood’s Golden Age, seeing the release of 12 Angry Men, Rear Window and Singin’ in the Rain - but it’s also the decade that produced some of the corniest, cheesiest horror movies ever created. The posters of the time reflected the mood of the films: brash, gaudy, ludicrous in scale and conception. Science fiction posters have intrigued, inspired and occasionally frightened us since the earliest days of film.