Plays, TV shows, and concerts all provide great entertainment value, but you know what’s also fun to see? The different kinds of promotional posters and what all sorts of designers do to create them!
“Wer hat Angst vor Virginia Woolf? (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)” (above, left) is a play created by American playwright Edward Albee. When the Theater Orchester Biel Solothurn put on a production of the show, they asked designer and illustrator Stephan Bundi to create the promotional posters. The story of the play, which examines the dysfunctional marriage of a middle-aged couple, Martha and George, compared to the relationship of a naive college couple, Nick and Honey, drove Bundi’s 2023 Platinum-winning design. To represent the entangled relationship between the couples, he depicted two human profiles seemingly melded together as the focus of the poster. Despite facing away from each other, the two figures remain stuck to one another, hinting at the clear connections between the two couples despite their outward contradictions in the play. While Nick and Honey seem like a happy young couple in contrast to George and Martha’s fading, resentful relationship, Albee makes the point through the characters that all couples, no matter how ideal they appear, can have issues, misconceptions, and lack of communication in the relationship.
Another Platinum-winning promotional poster from our 2023 competition was designed by the team at LOGAN for Sony Columbia Picture’s “Empire V (“Ампир V”) 2022” (above, right). The movie is based on the Russian cult novel by Victor Pelevin, which is a biting satire of hegemonic society that follows the main character’s journey into darkness when he gets initiated into a world ruled by corrupt vampires. Wanting to explore all the main characters, the design team created a series of animated posters that transformed each character into stunning digitally sculpted 3D avatars, enabling the designers to realistically emulate human features such as hair and skin. These portraits were brought to life with the help of animation software to make digital billboards, moving posters, and a social media campaign in addition to traditionally printed posters.
