Reflections on Kidd, Verdesoto & Stranger Things

by: Greta Hammen

Chip Kidd has an amazing career of designing book covers! Book covers need to get the attention of customers and lead them to want to know more about the contents. After an author has written a story, he takes their creative work and makes a separate creative thing, as he interprets it. He referred to that as “a child that needs to be dressed”. James Verdesoto is one of the Creative Directors at Indika Entertainment. He explained so nicely, how the posters for movies are done and the things that are emphasized. Red and white are typically used for comedies and allows the characters to stand out on the background. The use of negative space is strategic in terms of where it leads the viewers eyes to focus. The color blue is used in thrillers many times and they include a running man too, to emphasize that something is going to happen. What about a significant profile? Russell Crowe is a great character actor, in The Next Three Days, the advertising company used his profile and included an inset, like his thoughts, in a smaller image. When a movie budget is on the conservative side, yellow is a great background for the poster, because you get a lot of bang for your buck! Some examples of this are The Brown Bunny, Little Miss Sunshine and The Optimist 3. The use of negative space and the placement of the actor’s name was also significant on those posters, famous actor’s names go above the movie title. Action movies frequently use black and white with a little fire to create contrast, think of Die Hard and The Fast & Furious. Lastly, in the video with Verdesoto, he talked about blue and orange. They are complimentary colors and Star Wars used it in different ways with negative space to reach audiences that were different.

In the Stranger Things YouTube interview, we see that the font was derived from books from 1980’s book covers. By shining light through the letters imperfections were made visible, and they liked that, so that is how the opening for Stranger Things came into being. The jobs that the two individuals have in each video are dream jobs! CA is a wonderful place to live to be able to do that type of work!