10 points for special effects, minus 100 for typography
Posted December 27th, 2009.
I’m a bit of a Sci-Fi buff and not surprisingly, after seeing Avatar today I thought the movie was excellent. The special effects are amazing, as is the 3D viewing technology which is becoming more common place in new movies. However…
As you’ve all no doubt seen by now, and to the bewilderment of designers the logotype for Avatar is papyrus. Even stranger is the choice to use it for the movies sub titles, which play a significant role throughout the film. I can’t think of anything worse for a paragraph of copy than papyrus.
For such technically ambitious effects and what will no doubt go on to be an extremely successful film, it seems bizarre to use the most overused font in history.
I understand the selection was to tie in with the ancient/tribal nature of the films characters, but surely there was something, anything else out there that would have done the job.
I mean, come on…
Special effects: 10/10, Papyrus logotype: 1/10, Papyrus subtitles: -100/10.
“The purpose of great editorial design is telling the story, not making fellow designers come in their pants” – Julie Katrine Andersen.
She’s right, you know. But so are you.
The movie was great, the logo was definitely a bit of a dud though.
Mornatur,
I’m not suggesting it should have been some wildly “creative” and unexpected typeface, but no story should be told in Papyrus :P
Seriously get over it!
What the heck are you talking about 10 points for special effects. The effects were AMAZING did you even see how much time was spent making everything in that movie?
They made their own ecosystem and created a program that grew trees and some that grew larger than others which killed off the others below because they starved them of light and so trees that needed less light grew below and adapted to their surroundings.
For every insect in the scenes there are about ten-thousand more hidden all around the scene (when the lead designer could see 50 and they had 50000 he asked them to bump it up to 60 insects) there was so much design put into this movie but no you don’t care about that all you care about is the frickin font used!
IT WAS NOT MADE FOR DESIGNERS BUT FOR THE VIEWERS!
Argh pretentious jerks like you who think they are special just because they know something about fonts piss me off so much!
Andrew,
If you’d read my post you’d have seen my opening paragraph says “I thought the movie was excellent. The special effects are amazing”.
I figured “10 points” was a fairly standard measurement to say something was excellent i.e. 10/10. I guess not for everyone…
I mentioned several things regarding the movie, 1 of which was my opinion on the logotype. You’re posting yours 4 months after mine was posted, perhaps you should take your own advice about “getting over it”.