The first movie poster was created by Jules Cheret, a French painter and lithographer, who created a poster for a film called ‘Projections Artistiques’ in 1890 – the poster showed the image of a lady holding a card with the film showing times. The first poster which actually used images from the film didn’t appear until 1896.
With the 1920s came the the golden age of the silent movie, and with the golden age of the silent movie came the development of the movie poster – which now showed illustrations of the stars of the movie, along with their names, the title, and perhaps even a slogan. Many posters adopted the art deco style fashionable at the time, with strong linear features and big bold fonts.
By the 1950s movie advertisements were starting to show in magazines, and were looking more like colour photographs than the painted sketches they started as.
Here’s a digital mock-up of what our movie logo would look like, contributed by Allen Namiq.
(For those who don’t know about lithography printing – here’s an example… and thank god we live in the age of electronic printers!)
Monochrome Movies 