Astenorello
Lettering is a strong visual tool for the cinematic industry and designers use it to make memorable and customized branding. Many productions use typography and custom logos to recreate the visual concept and identity of the story. While some other studios prefer lettering or even calligraphy sometimes, especially for fantasy and historical movies.
In this article I’ll show you 6 of the most iconic movies and TV series lettering of our time.
Harry Potter
Harry Potter’s title lettering is maybe one of the most iconic in pop culture. The famous Harry Potter “P” was not a font, but a customized lettering logo for the U.S. book editions. Its creator is the illustrator Mary GrandPré and she included the lightning bolt in it to represent Potter’s scar. The gothic-style, sharp and metallic lettering for the movies took inspiration directly from that “P” logo.
The graphic design duo MinaLima made the movie lettering, calligraphy, all the hand-written text and drawings. They created all on-screen materials like letters, maps and newspapers. For example, Mina herself wrote the green ink heading in the Hogwarts Acceptance Letter. And they also wrote and drew the Marauder’s Map and for The Daily Prophet, they got inspired by historical sans-serif fonts of early 900’s journals.
The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings lettering is probably one of the most recognizable of the whole movie industry. Every element was made to match J.R.R. Tolkien’s story, drawings, writings and alphabets.
Daniel Reeve was the calligrapher behind all the lettering and calligraphy in The Lord of the Rings saga and also The Hobbit movies. During an interview on the Calligraphy Masters Podcast, he explained how he was hired. He said he reached out to the movie production and sent them a letter with a sample of an elvish writing and then he got the job.
Reeve crafted two versions of the Middle Earth map; one was for merchandising and the other appeared on-screen. He created the first map copying the Tolkien book map. While for the second one he stated he partially modified the original map to recreate the map of the area where he lives. Reeve copied the elvish writing on the Sauron’s ring from original Tolkien’s inscription. He even invented a script, inspired by uncial, to recreate the Bilbo’s “spidery” handwriting in the Red Book. And he also wrote the documents about the ring read by Gandalf, Balin’s book in Moria, Sarouman’s book, the poem about Gil-Galad’s fall and many more. He created as well the lettering for film titles in different languages for both the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit sagas.
And finally Reeve was involved in the Hobbit movies too. He copied and partially modified the Lonely Mountain map and he crafted Bilbo’s contract. He wrote all the Lake Town lettering, dwarvish writings and Radagast’s book. And he invented a script for the orcs language to write the promise of payment for Thorin’s head.
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Star Wars
Star Wars lettering, with its geometrical and futuristic forms, probably makes the most known movie logo, since its fans are cross-generational.
The Star Wars logo, as we know it today, is an edited version of Helvetica Black. Its story began in 1977, when George Lucas commissioned Suzy Rice a logo that looked “fascist” and massive. So Rice took inspiration from the typography of the Nazist Germany propaganda and chose the font Helvetica Black as the basis of her design.
The yellow writings, at the beginning of the movies, are not lettering nor calligraphy, but typographical fonts. The title’s font is Franklin Gothic Demi, while the text is News Gothic Bold.
And finally here’s the story of Aurebesh’s alphabet. Initially it didn’t really exist and its first graphic apparition was in the movie “The Jedi Return” in 1983. But it was just some decorative and angular signs without any real meaning. In 1994 Stephen Crane created the Aurebesh alphabet for the official game of the Star Wars saga. Later, thanks to its success, it was incorporate in more recent movies and in the remasterization of the oldest ones.
Game of Thrones
The saga of “Games of Thrones” has been considered as the most talked-about TV series and the main title sequence won an Emmy Award. Its lettering is actually a modified version of the Trajan font. This font’s origins are the inscriptions from Trajan’s Column in Rome. And the designer Carol Twombly redesigned it to create a modern version of it for Adobe in 1989.
Also, the main series title is a customized lettering based on Trajan font. In fact the foundation is Trajan while the customizations are the “O” with three rows inside and the “T” that covers the letters at its left. Its creator is the London-based designer Charlie Samways, who crafted the logo for the studio Elastic.
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Stranger Things
The audience didn’t appreciat Stranger Things only for its plot, but also for its catchy graphic design. Many people consider it to be a typographic masterpiece of the last years because of its iconic logo. But that is not proper lettering; it is an already existent font, the ITC Benguiat created by Ed Benguiat. The design agency Imaginary Forces chose it to evoke an 80s sci-fi atmosphere. They partially modified the font to adapt it to the title, creating that looming effect red alphabet that everyone loves.
Wednesday
Even if Wednesday is the most recent TV series of this list, many design critics defined it as a masterpiece of typography. Filmograph was the design studio that created the custom lettering for the movie titles. The team got inspired by Burton’s style and tried to realize a dark, gothic and kind of horror aesthetic.