You've seen it, but you may not have realized it: Trajan. It's quite literally the typeface that took over movie posters and it is everywhere.
A little background, courtesy of trajanadam.wordpress.com:
Trajan is an old style serif typeface designed in 1989 by Carol Twombly for Adobe. The design is based on the letterforms of capitalis monumentalis or Roman square capitals, as used for the inscription at the base of Trajan’s Column from which the typeface takes its name. Twombly’s cut of Trajan has become very popular, as seen in its nearly constant presence on American movie posters, television shows and book covers.
Here are a few videos that cover the ubiquity of Trajan, should you want to dive deeper:
Trajan…
You've seen it, but you may not have realized it: Trajan. It's quite literally the typeface that took over movie posters and it is everywhere.
A little background, courtesy of trajanadam.wordpress.com:
Trajan is an old style serif typeface designed in 1989 by Carol Twombly for Adobe. The design is based on the letterforms of capitalis monumentalis or Roman square capitals, as used for the inscription at the base of Trajan’s Column from which the typeface takes its name. Twombly’s cut of Trajan has become very popular, as seen in its nearly constant presence on American movie posters, television shows and book covers.
Here are a few videos that cover the ubiquity of Trajan, should you want to dive deeper:
Trajan Is the Movie Font (~2 min)
How One Typeface Took Over Movie Posters (~4 min)
Yves Peters - Two Decades of Trajan in Movie Posters (~46 min)
Yves Peters - Trajan in Movie Posters: The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire (~43 min)
Many posters have alternate versions (Jim Cameron's Titanic, for example) that are set in Trajan, but if that version isn't on Letterboxd, it won't appear in this list. I'm also going to be aesthetically picky, and won't include every poster I come across.
