Typography for Film Poster & Audience Feedback

To be able to successfully create my film poster I will need to select appropriate fonts that will help convey my genre to the viewers. To help me find the right fonts and texts that I am looking for I am going to be using a website called DaFont - a student friendly site which allows you to download different font styles which you can then download into Photoshop.

I searched through various different fonts and narrowed it down to a selective list that I like. I need the name of my film to stand out against the background of my poster and make it easy for readers to see it and identify it as the title of the film. To achieve this I felt selecting fonts that had a bold and chunkier look to them was best as these were visually easier to see. I also liked a few which had an interesting design element to them that would match my trailers narrative so I added these to my list as well.

I combined the fonts I liked into a list and then I asked a group from my target audience to give me feedback. Gathering a lot of audience feedback on my decisions is important because I want to know that I am designing something that appeals to them and be aware of how successful I am at targeting my desired audience.

From researching drama film posters, I saw that the fonts used varied in their style. Some had a calligraphy feel to them with the text being italics, whereas others used basic ones that had a sharp, stylish feel. I wanted to select a few different fonts to see which style my target audience preferred.

All these differ in style, boldness e.c.t as I wanted to see which my audience felt would be best for my narrative.

The first 3 fonts are basic sans serif, many of these types appear on film posters for dramas as the simple fonts reflect the realistic nature of the films narrative. My target audience group consisted of 10 members (male and female).

The fourth font, I found more unconventional but still a good choice as it has a slight effect on it, making it look faded/eroded. I felt this was a relevant to my narrative as it fits in with my woodland location vibe that I have in my trailer.

The final font is my least favourite as I don't feel that it conforms to the genre very well. However, I wanted to make it an option to see if my target audience recognised this. Below is my survey that I sent out, I named the fonts after the order that they appear on this post, e.g. - font 1, font 2 e.c.t.

As you can see, font 3 and 4 both received 3 votes. The most popular font was number 2 with 4 votes. This survey has proven that my target audience seem to prefer the most conventional, drama-type font. I am not going to use this font in particular, I am going to explore the different options I have to use this type of font on my poster.