What are you afraid of?
When you walk into a dark room, you can’t see anything; and you’re wondering,
“wait, is there someone in here?” Or, “am I going to stumble into something?
Or…fall down, into something—like, a hole in the floor?”
“Who’s in here?—I can hear you breathing…”
Ever have an experience like that? I have, plenty.
That creepy sensation, the bundling of fearful instincts and sensate reactivity—there is a tingling, your nerves are heightened. There is a sense of wariness.
Your intuition says ”there’s something not right here.”
Such is the spirit of the occult—the hidden—
it’s not easily accessible, it’s shadowed, in the dark.
And encountering this, perhaps you’re afraid?
You’re fearful.
How do you express that—
reach-out to that emotion?
What’s the difference between fear, terror or horror?
They’re all activating—your body springs into
a state of hyper-alertness.
You are adrenalized.
In a legacy of decades of motion picture work, and hundreds of film projects since the 1970s, it’s my speciality to illustrate stories in the context of the main title—the collective micro-visualization of a logo, a compressed narrative graphic—GIRVIN designs logos for movies, a core component of the key art of theatrical advertising.
Audiences see the logo first, they read it as a teaser, and in the end, the smallest promotion in an online banner—it’s first-out, and last to be seen at the tail-end of
the promotional positioning for the film.
We’ve done this work for all the major motion picture studios; we’ve worked at Columbia, Disney, Paramount, Universal and Warner Brothers, as well as smaller groups like Costner’s Tig, Eastwood’s Malpaso, Silver’s Silver Pictures, Schwarzenegger’s Oak, Mel Gibson’s Icon, Sharon Stone’s Chaos, and Tony [and Ridley] Scott’s Scott Free.
The typical process is: read the script—usually on-site in a locked room, know the story, look at all the production design drawings, talk to the director and actors, kickoff meetings, sharing rounds of ideas.
Speaking to the imagery below, and this process, I met with Clive Barker to talk about design strategy for his “Nightbreed.” And I worked, back and forth, with Tim Burton and faxed ideations for “Sleepy Hollow.” I met onsite with the team at Paramount for “A Quiet Place.”
It’s an occult time of year, as you’ve likely observed—All Hallow’s Eve—which is, as you’re aware, a Christian celebration Allhallowtide, the time of the liturgical year’s remembrance of the dead—including the Saints [the Hallows,] the martyrs and all of the community of the departed. Of course, death is the shadow place—no one comes back from there, so what lies beyond is truly occult. In popular expressions, it’s the point of fear-inducing horror, the macabre and supernaturalism.
Speaking of fear, here are some of the logos that we’ve designed in celebration of fright—each is hand-crafted, customized to the narrative and the balance of the architecture of the title, points of emphasis and the legible flow of the expression.
Something Wicked This Way Comes, 1983
The Hunger, 1983
The Black Cauldron, 1985
The Serpent and The Rainbow, 1988
Clive Barker’s Nightbreed, 1990
The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, 1992
Dracula, 1992
Sleepy Hollow, 1999
Sliver, 2006
A Quiet Place, 2018
Ghost Town, 2008
The brand design linguistics of film logos are definitive to the genre,
in an earlier essay, I grouped them as studies in narrative types.
Developing unforgettable logotypes, narrative identity, is reaching into the lexicon of typographic propriety—the right lettered expression for the story, arranged in the right way, as a single-line or cluster. Mostly, for us, it’s a matter of hand-built, entirely customized fonts.
Words are meant to be read, and so too,
imbued with layers of meaning.
Tim
We collaborate in
everything we do.
GIRVIN | Strategic Brands
Explore our work in
Theatrical Branding
See our built environments at Osean
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