Font and colour choices

for my poster and

magazine

By Sophie Canning

Analysis of poster fontsSo I decided to research some movie posters for

inspiration about font choices. To do this I visited

www.film.com and searched ‘50 greatest horror

movies’. From this list I then chose 3 movie

posters to analyse. The first thing that I notice, is

that the font is in upper case for all three

posters. I like this feature as it makes the text

neat and bold. Also all 3 fonts chosen are quite

basic, but do a good job standing out on the

poster. These posters also remind me that the

title of my movie does not necessarily have to be

at the bottom of the page.

Dafont Mock-ups

Here are my favourite fonts from www.dafont.com, that would fit nicely in the horror

genre. I was unsure as to which one I was going to use. So I asked my media peer

Emily for her opinion. She said that ‘Friday 13th’ looked the most effective as it does

have a scary look to it but it has stayed bold and simple.

Analysis of poster colour schemes

I decided to analyse the same movie posters for their colour scheme

as they are popular and I can already quickly see similarities in terms

of colour. The left and right poster have decided to use a black

background, whilst the poster in the middle has decided to keep the

background white. Although they are both contrasting colours, the

posters look good with both white and black backgrounds. I will keep

this in mind when creating my movie poster. There are not many

colours in these posters but overall black and white/off white/ grey are

the most popular colours used in horror posters. Red is also a colour

that is often used in horror posters as it symbolised ‘blood’ or ‘danger’

kuler mock-ups

Here I have gone onto www.kuler.com and used the colour

pinwheel to select my colours. It is really easy to do this, and it

means that you can et exactly the shades that you want. In this

case I selected white, off-white, grey, red and black.

Analysis of movie magazine fonts

Here are 3 examples of movie magazines, that are featuring horror films

in particular. Already I can see similarities between the posters and

magazines that promote horror films. Both of them used basic yet bold

fonts and again the main headline is in higher case. There is obviously

more text on a magazine front cover than a poster, as there are pugs

and puffs. The colour of the fonts sty within the main colour scheme of

the horror pictures. For example the magazine on the left has flesh

coloured text. This looks professional as there are minimal colours used.

I will have to think about what colours I use in my magazine to ensure

that I don’t bombard it with loads of different colours.

Dafont mock-ups

Here are some font choices from www.dafont.com which I feel look bold but also

give a slightly sinister look without being too intense. I think my favourite one would

be ‘crimes times six’. I will be testing this out in my creation process of my

magazine, but if it doesn’t look right I have other options that I can use.

Analysis of colour schemes used

Again there is a trending theme with horror posters and magazines, in

that they tend to use a dark colour scheme. However, I have noticed a

difference in that, the colour scheme is predominantly black/ grey/ deep

red/ off-white, but a brighter colour is the also used. For example in the

empire magazine example, some of the text is bright pea green, and in

review magazine, yellow has also been used. I think this is an effective

feature a it makes certain parts of text ( which could have not been

seen easily) really stand out.

Kuler mock-ups

So here I have chosen red grey and

black by using the colour pinwheel.

These are typical colours for a horror

as I mentioned in poster colour scheme

analysis.

I also selected two brighter colours,

that are features of a magazine colour

scheme. I feel like yellow or green will

look good against my typical horror

colours.