yargh here be a blog post!

This week’s terribly awesome image comes from a promotional poster for wonderfully gritty, raw, and yet fanciful film, Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto Del Fauno). Unlike the rest of the posters for this film, the art is quite minimalist. Ceated by famed Hellboy creator and artist Mike Mignola, the design carries his signature style of simplicity and geometric forms. Like the rest of Mignola’s work, the color is very simplistic as well, relying on mostly black and a lovely shade of burnt sienna, with two flashes of a glowering yellow to make up the image of the Faun, one of the film’s main protagonists.

The use of shadowing is the main thing that caught my eye for this beautiful poster. Heavy contrast is one of my favorite design tools, and the way it is used in such a manner as to make the highlights of a dramatically shadowy mysterious faun is very effective. Of course, the poster wouldn’t be as nearly intriguing if it weren’t for the two-tone shadowing. If there were a full scale of brown and black shades, the image would lose its teeth.

The classic labyrinth insignia at the bottom of the poster is a very nice balance along with the text to the image of the faun. Likewise, the style it is in matches the faun’s. Had it been any more or less ornate, it would have thrown the look off a bit. I like the font used for the text, however, I can’t help but wonder how it would look if it were the same smoldering-ember-yellow of the faun’s eyes. Right now, the sterile white stands way out of everything else on the poster. However, this is probably the designer’s intent- to make this one bit of information more noticeable than the rest. I also wish that the “Winter 2006” weren’t there. In the same white as the film’s title, it detracts from the more important website title, which houses all information about the film. All in all, the poster is a success, looking more like the cover of an ancient tome of fairy tales than anything else, and the fans of the film would have it no other way.