MULTIPLE FORMATS

Poster designs don’t just get used for posters: the same imagery must also be reusable across a range of media, from DVD covers to billboard ads. “You can design the best poster ever, but if you can’t reformat it, it goes bye-bye,”.

One increasingly important consideration is that designs work as thumbnails when viewed on mobile devices, and in online stores like iTunes and Netflix – whose format for displaying images describes as “the future of poster design”. Unlike conventional posters, images in Netflix listings have to work in a horizontal format without overshadowing those to either side in color or contrast: a new visual language that is still in development.