On the screen, director Vicente Minnelli’s phenomenally successful six-time Oscar-winner is a triumph of splashy design with a knowingly retro artisan aesthetic throughout. Gold went on to enjoy a prolific seven-decade career designing all-time classic posters for the likes of Hitchcock, Kubrick, Ridley Scott and Clint Eastwood. Likewise 21-year-old New Yorker Bill Gold was just another in-house illustrator at Warner Brothers when he drafted the film’s poster, a superbly detailed character montage enlived by the exuberant curve of the hand-lettered title, adding an eye-catching splash of colour to help sell a monochrome film.
Typography lovers, graphics geeks and film fans, here’s our round up of the best-designed artworks from the Saul Bass-inspired West Side Story to the photomontage style of Moonlight.ĭirected by Michael Curtiz, Casablanca was famously just another production-line studio quickie before it struck box office gold and became an immortal, much-quoted romantic classic.
In anticipation of this year’s Academy Awards we’ve taken a look back at the film posters promoting each winner of the Best Picture category in the award’s 90-year history.