Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Trajan: The Most Overused Font in Movie Title Design

This is topic Trajan: The Most Overused Font in Movie Title Design in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

To visit this topic, use this URL:
https://ft-forum.com/ft/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=8;t=000833

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 04-07-2002, 04:09 AM:

Let's face it. Movie title design really has to go back to the well for some more ideas. I mean, just how many great font designs are out there? Lots of them! But I see Trajan popping up again and again and again and again and again. Trajan is a great looking, classy all caps titling font. Don't get me wrong about that, I love the typeface. But it is getting done to death by the freaking movie people who cannot get the least bit original about their titling fonts. Damn! There's a perfectly good Jenson titling font that needs to be used more often. Aries? Hello!? What about Garamond Titling? Geez, you get that one as a freebie with Adobe Illustrator or PageMaker.

I'm merely posting this image of hit films and fairly new title release names just to show how badly Trajan is being overused. I'm not against it being used for movie title design (or TV design either --please note I did not show the "Six Feet Under" or "Sex and the City" title design). Trajan just has to be spared a little bit. It was good when "Stargate" and "Interview with the Vampire" were the only films using it years ago. Now it seems like there is not a week that goes by where I don't find a new release in the paper where Trajan is used bigger than life for the advertising.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 04-07-2002, 09:52 PM:

What I wish is that George Lucas would stop thinking people are too stupid to find "the newest Star Wars movie" and go back to using a real title in big type, instead of the current style.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 04-07-2002, 10:29 PM:

The original "Star Wars" logo is an icon onto itself. And I liked how "The Empire Strikes Back" played off of the Star Wars logo lettering. "Return of the Jedi" stepped away from that in its poster art, resorting to Times for the lettering while including the Star Wars logo as a header to it. I guess the art in the current trilogy design is somewhat similar to that approach. Trajan is an excellent looking titling font, but with how often is used again and again, I would have figured Lucasfilm would choose a more unique typeface.

I like when movie titles are made into logos. "Apocalpse Now" has a good title logo. Same for "The Matrix," "Shrek," "Toy Story" and "Tron". At least with these films, you feel like more effort went into coming up with a good title design and having the personality of the film come out with it. I'm not completely against Trajan being used in a film title, but since so many films are using it (across so many different genres) all the face tends to do anymore is say "this film is classy" and little else.

Posted by Ken Lackner (Member # 1002) on 04-07-2002, 10:57 PM:

One of my favorites is Gill Sans used for Frequency. I called New Line and asked them what font that was when I did my promotion for that movie.

I never realized that all those logos used the same font.

Nice picture! Did you make that, or did you find it on the internet somewhere?

------------------
This one time, at Projection Camp, I stuck a xenon bulb....

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 04-07-2002, 11:41 PM:

Thanks for the comment about the image. I composed all the lettering within CorelDRAW, exported an EPS file of it to Adobe Illustrator where I did a little more tweaking to the objects and then pasted the vector paths across the clipboard into Adobe Photoshop. From there I applied all the color and raster effects work. Most of the work was pretty easy. It took me less time to finish that little project than it normally does for me to vectorize some logos. I like the logo for "Robocop". It took me a while to make a vectorized version of that to play with.

Posted by Ken Lackner (Member # 1002) on 04-08-2002, 06:53 PM:

raster....vectorize....EPS....etc.....Way over my heard! But nice job!

------------------
This one time, at Projection Camp, I stuck a xenon bulb....

Posted by Charles Everett (Member # 889) on 06-06-2002, 03:29 PM:

I've found at least two more titles using Trajan:

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
Reign of Fire

Incidentally, that Trajan typeface for Titanic is on the DVD only. The original logo for theatrical/VHS has a "battleship" look to it.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 06-06-2002, 06:06 PM:

The opening title card within the movie "Titanic" is set in Trajan Bold. I have a really large silk screened lobby banner for "Titanic" (the "sail into history" banner with the "summer" tagline on it --which might make it worth something since the film's release was pushed back to holiday season). The type on that banner is a customized version of Compacta --it has small serifs added to the normally sans-serif letter forms.

Posted by Charles Everett (Member # 889) on 09-25-2002, 03:25 PM:

More in the Trajan crowd:

Blood Work
Trapped
Crazy as Hell (opens in NYC this Friday)
Moonlight Mile
Red Dragon

I'll bet Bobby saw xXx -- now THAT is a great logo!

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-25-2002, 05:26 PM:

"XXX" is okay for a movie title logo. What I would like to see is a little more effort than that.

Take "Planet of the Apes" for instance, as an example of "extra effort." I'm not sure of the details, but Fox' marketing department apparently paid House Industries/Brand Design and the Font Bureau to custom design the Simian Display type family, of which the Planet of the Apes title is based. Visit: http://www.houseind.com, choose the Search By Font Name dialog and scroll down to Simian Fonts to see an example of the family.

Anyone could have developed the Planet of the Apes title in a vector drawing program like Illustrator or Freehand and just left it alone. But that "extra effort" was put into creating a complete typeface family with both text and display families along with special character "ligature" sets. That's pretty cool. Especially when one actually knows the kind of time required for developing a complete typeface. That is no easy thing. You have to draw out all the characters, get them tweaked just right, fool with the letter spacing, make kerning pairs, go back and adjust certain letter glyphs to correct some spacing headaces, and on and on. And you do that for every individual font weight you design. Fox probably paid a lot of money to have the things drawn up. And you get to pay $150 for the fonts if you want them. That helps pay for all that design time.

And just think, Fox could just have easily used Trajan and maybe a lot of people would not have really cared.

Posted by Michael Schaffer (Member # 1204) on 09-25-2002, 07:41 PM:

Which font is the original Star Wars logo? I don`t know the first thing about fonts, but I think I have seen this used a lot in 70s contexts.
Michael

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-25-2002, 09:03 PM:

The lettering in "Star Wars" is really a logo only. I derived a vector version of it a long time ago (by scanning in my soundtrack CD cover as a source) and recall repetitive letters like "A", "R" and "S" were not identical in the multiple places they appear in the logo.

However, people have made knock off designs based on the logo. "The Matrix" is another such example. That one is just the Times font being chopped apart and welded in other spots. But a knock off version of that one exists.

Not too many films have their own custom fonts created for them. I'm pretty sure "Fight Club" had its own custom font made for it. I don't know if "Apostrophe" is the original designer of the face, but you can download the font, Fight This, free of charge in Mac or PC format from his site (see package 0014). http://www.apostrophiclab.com/

Posted by Oscar Neundorfer (Member # 458) on 09-27-2002, 07:29 AM:

Bobby,

I do a lot of Corel Draw and Photoshop stuff, but I can't even come close to the look you created in the image in your original post. I would love to sit and watch you create this kind of thing just to pick up some techniques. Now what would be WAY cool is if you could just transfer some of that creative spark over to me!! Technique is one thing, creativity is something else entirely.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-28-2002, 02:45 PM:

That's why I make the big bucks (I wish).

With "cheap" or "free" being big influences on the graphics market, it is tough for real graphic designers to sell someone on doing a web site design or print marketing campaign with real graphic design quality. Many businesses think they can do it all in house.

That comes from a basic standpoint that people don't see computer art in the same terms as traditional art. Anyone can buy a new multiprocessor Mac, load it with Photoshop and a slew of other programs. But in the end, they are staring at the same blank canvas as they would if trying to tackle the fine art of oil painting, charcoals or pastels. The design concept one develops in the mind, and the ability to make that concept realized on canvas, paper or in Photoshop is the big difference.

I'm looking at things like 3D animation and digital video oriented graphics as a different field to explore. DV is very excluding from the wannabes for the relatively high hardware/software price for entry. A person has to be pretty serious about what they do to get into that field. You can't "download" a new Panasonic AG-DVX100 3CCD camera off Morpheus (much less all the other gear to go with it).

To get back on "Trajan", I'm finding it in more places --like the new personalized license plate that finally came in the mail for my sportside pickup:

Posted by Charles Everett (Member # 889) on 01-12-2003, 12:04 PM:

Now you see it in movie studio logos!

Touchstone Pictures has replaced the animated logo used since its first release (Splash). The new logo appears for the first time on 25th Hour. This logo fades in, takes up the center of the frame and is gold with the studio name in . . . Trajan.

Posted by Aaron Sisemore (Member # 145) on 01-12-2003, 02:35 PM:

I seem to recall that 'Signs' used the new 'centered' Touchstone logo as well.

-Aaron

Posted by John Wilson (Member # 269) on 01-14-2003, 07:44 PM:

But they keep going back to the old logo...what's with that? Surely, once you change...you change. Odd.