Better Leave the Dinosaurs in Skeletons!

Jurassic Park is a science fiction adventure film and it tells the story of John Hammond, a billionaire who has built a theme park with dinosaurs by cloning them back to life from the DNA sample found in ancient times. During a preview tour, John invited four individuals and his two grandchildren to see the park before opening to the public. However, during the stay, an employee tried to steal some dinosaur embryos and caused a major power breakdown that allowed the dinosaurs escaped and became a threat.

The poster is very clean and neat with a great deal of white space well organized and used. Remember less is better. The interesting thing about negative space in this poster is that viewers won’t be able to notice the empty background unless their conscious tells them so. The designer of the poster made the poster intriguing and strong concept-oriented so that people won’t be able to realize how the background is solely one black color.

The designer made a smart decision to have a prominent focal point, which is the image of the logo of the Jurassic Park. The image is positioned on one third of the page from the top applying the rule of thirds. The position of the image suggests it is the most important ingredient to the poster. Another thing to pay attention to is that there are smaller things gathered around the focal point to leave a heavy visual weight compared the blank background.

The color contrast in the poster is also worth complimenting, with the bold red and orange seperate it from the black background. The color red used as the background color for the logo seems like rays of red lights are filling the whole logo, and it represents a dangerous atmosphere that is the theme of the movie. The silhouette of the dinosaur implies that the film is going to be heavily based around dinosaurs, which gives viewers heads up of what they will be seeing in the movie. In addition, the position of the dinosaur makes it appear scary, foreboding what could come in the film.

The poster is one of the most simple yet memorable movie posters out there. Although the movie is considered a special effects marvel, not a single animatronic dinosaur appears on the movie poster but a logo. Surprisingly, it works because the branding for the movie is identical to the branding seen in the film’s fictional park.

The designer Chip Kidd chose the T-rex skeleton as the major element presented in the poster, because all that’s left of real dinosaurs are bones. It turns out making the logo an icon that puts the poster into a perfect representation of the film’s deeper themes, which is how people wrongly believe they can create and control the natural world. The nature they create might be artificial, but it still proves too hard to control, so better leave the dinosaurs as bones or skeletons.

In conclusion, the poster uses focal point and color contrast to provide general overviews of what viewers would experience in the film, and the atmosphere and theme of the movie. Despite the fact of the poster being really simple, it demonstrates a great value of design principles and that makes the poster one of the iconic pop culture elements even now.