{"id":11597,"date":"2011-04-14T20:01:10","date_gmt":"2011-04-14T19:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/?p=11597"},"modified":"2011-04-14T20:01:10","modified_gmt":"2011-04-14T19:01:10","slug":"trajan-the-movie-font","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/2011\/04\/14\/trajan-the-movie-font\/","title":{"rendered":"Trajan: The Movie Font"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Why do so many movie posters use the Trajan<\/a> font?<\/p>\n

Designed by Carol Twombly<\/a> for Adobe<\/a> in 1989, the old style serif typface quickly found its way into pop culture.<\/p>\n

It is was used on the bestselling novels<\/a> of John Grisham<\/a>, became the official font of various universities around the world (including Bologna<\/a>, Kansas<\/a> and Lausanne<\/a>) and the Assassin’s Creed<\/a> game franchise.<\/p>\n

Politicians love it too, with figures such as Chris Dodd<\/a>, Tim Pawlenty<\/a>, Mitt Romney<\/a> and even Barack Obama<\/a> using it in past campaigns.<\/p>\n

But it became hugely popular with movie poster designers, as this video by Kirby Ferguson<\/a> demonstrates.<\/embed>Posters which feature the font include Titanic<\/a> (1997), Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) and more recently This Is It (2009).<\/p>\n

But check out this slideshow to get some idea of how ubiquitous it has become:<\/p>\n

<\/param><\/param><\/param><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

The easy answer as to its success is that it has been used in popular movies, but I think there is a deeper reason as to why it became so popular.<\/p>\n

Maybe the old-style classiness projects an image of authority, which might also explain why politicians love it.<\/p>\n

This is actually important for upscale mainstream films such as Titanic which are looking for that veneer of class to distinguish themselves from rival fare at the multiplex.<\/p>\n

In a sense the font has come to represent a hybrid of commercial success and cultural importance, even if the films using it have neither.<\/p>\n

Maybe after the phenomenon of Titanic, it spread like a virus amongst movie marketing departments because they wanted to emulate that elusive holy grail of box office dollars and worthy prestige. <\/p>\n

> Find out more about Trajan<\/a> at Wikipedia
\n> IMP Awards<\/a>
\n> Movie Poster Addict<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why do so many movie posters use the Trajan font?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11599,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,36],"tags":[1993,1994,1992],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11597"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11597\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}