Exhibit C: Hand-Lettered Indie Movies

Sorry it’s been such a long time since I last added an exhibit to my little virtual museum. I’ve been really busy with…being a college student.

But I haven’t forgotten TBiaM (do you like the cute acronym?)*, and I’m here to add a little entry on a trend I’ve been noticing for a very long time now.

We’re talking about the logos for independent movies. I don’t mean any movie that was made by a small independent studio, I mean movies that are in that self-consciously quirky “Indie Style”, like Juno or Napoleon Dynamite. For the purpose of this article, I will refer to these as Indie Movies, as distinguished from independent movies as a whole.

Have you ever noticed that the trailers and posters (and usually credits) for these Indie Movies (especiallly the oddball comedy-romances) overwhelmingly use hand drawn, 10-year-old-with-a-crayon-style, lettering in their titles? Let me show you a few examples, and you’ll see what I mean:

 

 

 

Alright, there are a boatload of other examples out there, but you see the general style. Whether cartoony block letters or marker-drawn cursive, I can understand why this sort of lettering is appropriate: it recreates the playful, irreverent, tongue-in-cheek mood found in many of these films. What I find unusual is the fact that the style has been adopted en masse across the entire genre, almost serving as an essential semiotic marker for what audiences can expect from the movie. 

This use of a specific title typeface as a label for an entire genre is already in use for the largely inane ”—Movie” parody films, eg:

:

Here, these parody films use all-caps red block letters as a marker for the genre of movie they advertise. In a similar trend, the typeface Trajan has been used on nearly every action, adventure, or horror film produced in the last 10 years, as amusingly exposed by Kirby Ferguson:

Scary Movie 1 is clearly the grandfather of the red block-letter parody movie line, and Trajan as a movie font with “epic” connotations has its roots in Roman monumental inscriptions (you’d know that if you watched the youtube video!). However, the primogenitor of the hand-drawn indie movie title is less clear. 

After some research into the chronology, I point to Napoleon Dynamite as the culprit. This oddball 2004 indie comedy predates most of the trend and was a watershed in terms of creating the quirky Indie Movie style. 

While not among my favorite films, I believe many later movies (particularly Juno) are indebted to Napoleon Dynamite’s ironically uncool characters, tongue-in-cheek tone, overload of kitschy pop-culture references, and, apparently, it’s hand-drawn title card.** In the case of ND, the hand-drawn titles are a specific reference to events in the movie, namely Napoleon’s eccentric drawing hobby. While this makes a drawn title font a logical choice, later movies have borrowed it’s style and lettering without it’s in-movie references to actual drawing. That’s how we end up with hand-illustrated typefaces advertising movies that have nothing to do with actual hand-illustration. 

Simultaneously, hand-lettering has been catching on all across the graphic design industry in advertisements, band identities, and book designs. Michael Perry has catalogued this development in his provocatively-titled book Hand Job, which I highly recommend. I believe this increased interest in irreverent, humanistic, hand-made lettering is a Postmodern rejection of the stark, clean, mechanical typefaces of Modernism that have long dominated design until recent years. But that’s a topic for another day.

Continuing Research: I believe this all fits into much larger potential research project regarding the semiotics of typefaces. While it’s established design theory that typefaces can be used add a desired “tone” or “feel” to text (clean, mechanical Helvetica vs. old-world, humanist Garamond, for example), certain fonts convey a meaning of all on their own, independent of the actual content of the text. The hand-drawn lettering says, “quirky indie movie” and red block letters say “parody movie”, the actual title of the film is unimportant. I’d like to explore this concept further.

Food for Thought: Can you think of other movie styles that adopt a fairly consistent graphical identity across the genre? How much do you personally judge the genre or tone of a movie by it’s poster? Can you think of other fields of design where typography conveys an independent semiotic meaning, rather than acting purely as a vehicle of the content of the text?

 

*This is technically not an acronym, it is an initialism. Acronyms are pronounced as a new word, like NATO or NASA. Initialisms, on the other hand are spelled out, like NBC or LSD. You learn something everyday.

**Some trace these characteristics back to Wes Anderson Films, contending that Napoleon Dynamite was simply a poor man’s Rushmore. Still others, in turn, argue that Wes Anderson is simply a poor man’s Francois Truffaut, but that’s beside the point. I guess nothing’s original anymore.

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