One of the visual design assignments I would give my students was to design a movie poster. It would be for a film of their own invention, so as not o be influenced by existing posters. The assignment required them to use a number of course topics (composition, color, line, etc.). Obviously, fonts were part of the design but I realized after I received my first semester submissions that students had not given enough consideration to fonts.

I would point them to the ScreenFonts series of reviews focusing on movie-poster typography. I especially like the examples that are really type-driven designs.

One poster that I had used as an example that appears in that series is Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up. The one above was a teaser poster used in the U.K. that used a very font-driven design. More traditional are the two posters below. You can analyze the use of typography (Futura Black, Surveyor Fine Bold) and discuss which of the two is more effective and why. And is one more American, one more Italian?