Thor: Ragnarok © 2017 Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. LA goes full-blown eighties-video-game extravaganza, with a riotous color palette and an 8-bit-inspired custom logo so bad it’s good.

For the IMAX release, LA cleverly deconstructed the main character’s silhouette to accommodate the remainder of the main cast.

Thor: Ragnarok © 2017 Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Tracie Ching’s interpretation of Marvel’s God of Thunder crackles with energy. Simplifying—well, sort of—the multicolor explosion to flat rainbow gradients preserves the feel of the original, but serves the illustration style better.

Justice League © 2017 Warner Bros. Bond does something clever with negative space here, conjuring up the missing member of DC’s Justice League. Swapping out letters for the heroes’ logos may have seemed like a neat idea in theory, but produced a messy result in practice. For tall, squarish letters, take a look at Agency FB or Tasse.

Dara Ju (The Price) © 2017 Orion Pictures. Fragmenting and repeating Aml Ameen’s black-and-white portrait and blocking his eyes with a translucent carmine stripe is not just a masterful visual metaphor for his trials and tribulations, it also results in a gorgeous poster. The Extra Compressed weights of Benton Sans, which excellently capture the spirit of Morris Fuller Benton’s Alternate Gothic, would work well here.

Coco © 2017 Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Coco’s festival poster for the XV Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia pulls together an ingenious puzzle of characters and settings from the film to form a festive Dia de los Muertos skull. Salvo Serif and Giza display the same delicious chunkiness as the film’s logo; Mønster does, too, and also reverses the contrast.

Una mujer fantástica (A Fantastic Woman) © 2017 Sony Pictures Classics. The poetry of the delicately colorized image in this poster is somewhat hampered by the mechanical letterforms of FF DIN Condensed. DINosaur injects a welcome humanity and warmth into the technical sans genre.

Santa & Andrés © 2017 Breaking Glass Pictures. This beautifully colorized black-and-white photograph has a noticeable grain, which gives it a watercolor-like quality. Conceptually, LetterPerfect’s brush script Spring is a perfect match.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri © 2017 Fox Searchlight Pictures. Bond delves deep into the local vernacular, combining Missouri’s state boundaries in silhouette with simple sans-serif caps, a baseball-style script (cf. Casey, Delaney, and Tangier), and a casual brush sans to produce a quintessentially American sign. The layout and color palette are simply wonderful.

Sweet Virginia © 2017 IFC Films. Equally American are neon motel signs. Another lovely use of a grey-and-orange palette, with a border and creases that give the poster a vintage look. Having Jon Bernthal and the sign literally break through the border adds depth and dynamism to the design. Check DINosaur and New Zen for sturdy, softly rounded sans forms that would serve industriously in this type of neon signage.

Bamui haebyun-eoseo honja (On the Beach at Night Alone) © 2017 The Cinema Guild. Newcomer Brian Hung pairs a portrait of Kim Minhee in saturated pink and purple with an expressive/awkward dry-brush script. Notice how the horizon dramatically intersects with the nape of her neck and the tip of her nose.

This second version features a beautiful painting by Hung.

The background in the international festival poster has been washed out to allow for a thin monoline stylized script to be overlaid in purple.

Anchiporuno (Antiporno) © 2017 Nikkatsu. Sensuality and violence meet in this metanarrative about Japan’s softcore porn industry. Iconic Cooper Black feels right at home in this seedy environment.

ScreenFonts: December 2017 | The Leftovers