Typography Project - Chopping Mall
Disciplines
BluRay Cover, Poster Design, Typography-based Design
A typography assignment turns into an homage to 1980s consumerism and B-Movies in this Blu-ray cover design project.
The Project
In this Typography class assignment, our direction was to create a design concept around a single iconic movie line of our choice.
The design should be centered around this movie line and the typography should be the star.
Our instructions were to create a front cover, but I'm a bit extra and elected to do the full thing.
Client's original branding.
Client Research
Once I chose a direction, I spent some time researching the aesthetic and feel of the actual film, along with its color palette.
Chopping Mall takes place in a 1980s shopping mall, where a group of teens waits until after the mall closes to party in one of the stores. Unbeknownst to them, the mall's new security robots go on the fritz, making for one killer night. Literally.
Demographic
In a real client situation, the demographics for this design would be:
fans of B-Movies/cult classic films
horror movie fans
consumers looking to purchase a Blu-ray who may be unfamiliar with the film
consumers looking to purchase this specific film
likely slightly skewed male, although this is not a given
age 16 - younger baby boomer
Design Approach
I chose the line "Thank you, have a nice day." This is a phrase uttered by the "kill-bots", but we're all also painfully familiar with it in a retail setting.
This whole film is set in a shopping mall in the 1980s. When choosing my typography, I wanted to reflect those old school (then state-of-the-art) NCR cash registers with their dot matrix printed receipts.
Design Process
With this being a horror film set at night, the palette needed to reflect as much. The original poster has a bit of a gross-out effect to the design, but this would be more simplistic.
The robots repeatedly kill, and receipts have multiple lines of content, so I went with a repeating design. I used the shape of the kill-bot's claw to replace the C in Chopping, and voila!
The back cover is a nod to VHS tapes, and that design and typography were also carefully selected to mimic the back covers we saw so frequently in the age before DVDs.
